South Park
Phase 1: Collect Data. Phase 2:... Phase 3: Profit.
In an era where comedians have been booted from high profile jobs because of old tweets, actors have lost work after offensive resurfaced interviews, and late night talk show hosts have been canned by networks due to pressure from the President of the United States, you might imagine nobody is safe from being canceled.
And yet one TV show has made personal attacks on that same President, has brutally parodied all the major religions, touched on the most sensitive of topics in our culture (in the most graphic way) like abortion, racism, mental illness, school shootings, and does all this with an unparalleled vulgarity. And what has become of this TV show?
South Park is one of the most successful and longest running shows in the US and has made billions of dollars. If there was ever a TV show that has become un-cancel-able, it is without a doubt the this animated series.
Created by two college pals, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, it immediately pushed the boundaries of television with its debut in 1997 and has continued to do so for nearly 30 years. This continued partnership has resulted in successful movies, several hundred episodes of South Park, a ten-figure streaming deal, and even a hit Broadway musical (though not related to South Park, The Book of Mormon, celebrating 15 years on Broadway is undoubtedly the work and humor of the duo).
This analysis focuses on the TV series that has been running strong since 1997. Though there are handful of straight-to-streaming Paramount plus movies and a box office hit also in the canon, the following is an analysis of the TV show exclusively.
The Series
Since its creation in 1997, the show has aired 28 seasons and 331 individual episodes and the chart below lists them all with their original air date.
Parker and Stone have managed to keep a fairly steady stream of episodes since the series started in part because of the incredibly quick turnaround of new episodes. Whereas a new episode of Family Guy (another adult, animated TV show) may take 10 months to a year to create, a new episode of South Park can be written, animated, voiced, and ready to air in just six days. There’s a whole documentary on just this.
The biggest lull in new episodes was a period between spring of 2023 and summer of 2025. And if that seems like an intentional choice because of US politics, you’d be right.
“Obviously, [the election is] f***ing important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun.” —Matt Stone
That was from a Vanity Fair interview a few weeks before the presidential election where the duo explained a long break between seasons, which was also complicated by the Paramount/Skydance merger.
Each episode above is color coded by season, but below it is easier to see that the number of episodes per season has decreased through the years. Part of that might be because Matt and Trey are getting older and like spending time with their families, but they have also signed on to create more than a dozen hour-long streaming “movies” for Paramount in addition to the standalone TV series. But not even a global pandemic could stop new episodes of South Park from airing.
TV Ratings
Perhaps after running and writing the same show for a few decades, you might get a little bored and the quality might start to slip a bit? Thanks to IMDB’s ratings for each of the episodes, there is data to help answer this.
It’s easy to make the observation that seasons 5-11 were some really good years. The highest rated episode of all time, “Scott Tenorman Must Die” was right at the beginning of that window in Season 5 (2001). That being said, fewer episodes per season (see above) can skew the averages. Below are all the episodes from seasons 1-28 plotted by their IMDB rating. It’s hard to argue that South Park’s best days are behind it. Hover over an episode to isolate the season.
The worst rated episode aired all the way back in 1998 in Season 2 while the second highest rated episode, “Sermon on the ‘Mount” aired as recently as Season 27 (technically tied for 2nd with the infamous “Make Love, Not Warcraft” episode of Season 10). “Sermon on the ‘Mount” featured a rather hard-to-forget “PSA” to close the story arc.
Characters and Text Analysis
With 331 episodes, it’s easy for an animated show to rack up a large amount of characters. And as a rough count, there are approximately 4,700 characters with dialogue. That number includes characters with just a few lines like Morgan Freeman and Raccoony. And though both of those characters and the episodes in which they appear might be instantly recognizable to a big South Park fan, they only have 8 lines of dialogue each.
Picking an arbitrary number of 50 dialogue lines and then filtering out those who speak less than that, you’re still left with 150+ characters. So to make the following parts much more manageable, the floor was raised to only include those with 350-400+ lines of dialogue.
Anybody with even a cursory knowledge of South Park could probably tell you who the main character might be. Sometimes the protagonist and sometimes the antagonist but almost always the center of attention, Eric Cartman has significantly more lines than any other character in the series. Following Cartman are Stan and Kyle who are much more closely represented in speech.
And since its creation all those years ago, most advertisements, posters, DVD box sets, video game covers, and toilet paper holders (yes) include those three boys. And also Kenny. More recognized for his muffled speech caused by his oversized orange parka, it would seem it’s a no brainer to include him as an iconic South Park character. And yet, he doesn’t have that much dialogue as seen above. Even Sharon and Randy Marsh, Stan’s parents, have a combined 3x the number of lines as Kenny.
Part of that might have something to do with the number of episodes in which each character actually appears. Cartman has appeared in 313 episodes and yet Kenny has only appeared in 189. And when any of other “boys” are in an episode, they tend to have more lines in the episode than Kenny. Even Butters has about 15 lines on average per episode when calculating his lines / episode count but Kenny is has closer to just 6 lines.
A season-by-season breakdown for the 4 boys (and Butters!) is below. In season 28, for the first time, Stan had a larger percentage of dialogue on the show than Cartman. This 5 episode season was more topical with plots based more on characters like Donald Trump and Peter Thiel, so it makes sense that, combined, the boys had less than 25% of the dialogue for the season.
It’s also interesting to see where Butters started becoming more of a main character. Hovering over the yellow bars above, you can see that he had no dialogue in season 1. (And though it says 0.0% in season 2, technically Butters had 0.01% of the share of dialogue, but other than this fun bit of trivia, rounding to the hundredth of a percent seemed unnecessary.) Butters began to have an outsized role in the series beginning in seasons 5/6 which coincides with Kenny’s actual death (more on that later).
And then we can look at the average length, in words, of a line. It’s not entirely shocking that the adults and teachers tend to have longer dialogue since they’re more likely to give a speech, a lecture, or announcement and the children are more likely to be conversing with one another and therefore have more back and forth and less monologuing.
What the *@#&
Content and story aside, South Park is known for its outright raunchy, crass, and obscene language. The show has been called sordid, socially irreverent, and was the first ever weekly TV show rated TV-MA thanks, in large part, to the profanity.
Some characters have a dirtier mouth than others. When analyzing those characters with 400+ lines of dialogue, Jesus Christ, unsurprisingly doesn’t tend to curse a whole lot (he’s only dropped the F-bomb 7 times). And though, by volume, Cartman uses profanity more than any other character, that’s just because he has more dialogue than any other character. Kenny actually has the highest profanity-to-total-dialogue ratio, though since it’s often muffled, it might be hard to understand what he actually says.
Though some might have thought the profanity in the early seasons was just a “shock factor” and more substantive dialogue had come along since, well…
That’s not really the case. Hovering over any individual line above will isolate that character’s profanity percentage over the seasons and there doesn’t seem to be a real trend in any direction. Kenny is the outlier simply because he speaks so many fewer lines than the rest of the boys. In season 14, almost 12% of all of Kenny’s words—including words like the, and, I, etc.—are profanity!
For total profanity over time, the following charts show the number for each episode. Notably, the episode where there is a literal counter for the amount of times that the word “shit” is said, has the record for most profanity in a single episode. The titles of the follow up episodes probably say enough, too.
And when looked at as a share of total dialogue, each episode’s profanity can be visualized in a different way. Of all the episodes, 50% contain 24 or more profanity words and 95% of the episodes contain at least 7 explicit words. (Note: the two outliers in total word count below are “hour-long” episodes.)
And what were all of those bad words and all the profanity being spewed? Here is a list of the top 50 of those words. The list has been censored, but a bit of imagination will give you the entire word list.
They Killed Kenny!
A running gag on South Park has been the frequently-in-passing death of Kenny McCormick.
Kenny has been killed approximately 90 times in the TV series. There’s some ambiguity, but this fandom wiki article has a detailed breakdown of each death.
As you can see above, the early episodes have poor Kenny dying frequently and in nine instances, more than once per episode. But then the episode “Kenny Dies” aired.
Instead of some absurd death like being crushed by a volcanic boulder or literally laughing himself to death, Kenny is diagnosed with and eventually dies of muscular dystrophy. This Season 5 arc continues as characters actually mourn Kenny. He is then absent for some 20-something episodes (as seen in the dialogue counts above) before reappearing—as if nothing had happened—at the end of Season 6 (where Jesus dies and not Kenny). Since then, Kenny dying has become much less frequent and has only happened 3 times in the past decade.
What’s New?
With a show running as long as South Park, there are lots of inside jokes, common occurrences, and catchphrases. Some didn’t last and some are still ongoing.
Let’s start with Eric Cartman. If you start typing “screw you” on Google, the number two suggestion is “screw you guys, I’m going home.” Maybe not as famous as Homer Simpson’s “D'oh,” it’s still what you might call an iconic catchphrase in the TV world.
And yet, with Cartman’s nearly 12,000 individual lines of dialogue, it’s only been said 24 times over the years. Mostly said in the earlier seasons (1-4), Cartman uttered it once in season 7, and has only once said it since then in season 15. For reference, that was in 2011.
Not nearly intended as much of a repeat line than the above, a favorite Cartman moment of many is his association with “authoritah.”
The face of many a t-shirt and coffee mug, this line mostly stems from a single episode (S02E03), but Cartman’s repeated pronunciation of “authority” has become a bit of a gag. For example, a Confederate Cartman writing to President Clinton about seceding from the nation:
“Dear Mr. President. There are times when humans can no longer endure their government’s authoritah. You must declare the Confederaceh its own nation so that we may enter into a new millennium of prosperitah.”
Though referred to mostly as Eric Cartman or just Cartman, Kyle Broflovski has a nickname for him. And Kyle calls him this nickname “fat ass” 162 times.
Butters, who as seen above swears less than most of his friends, has a substitute word where others might stoop to profanity. And that word is hamburgers. First uttered in season 6, Butters says hamburgers in 14 separate episodes.
Mr. Macky, the guidance counselor turned ICE officer has a catchphrase that is oddly similar to his name: “M’kay.” Often used as a rhetorical question, there are a whopping 298 instances of this utterance.
Bonus: Most Common Words
Filtering out the stop words from each character (words like the, is, are, etc), below are some of the most commonly used words by the boys arranged in individual word clouds. Some fun observations:
In Butters’ word cloud you’ll find Eric but in Kyle’s word cloud, Cartman is his second most used word.
Kenny has three variations of the F word in his top 50 words.
Cartman uses Kyle’s name almost twice as much as Butters, the second most used name.
Stan’s use of dude dwarfs all of his words
For a list of 20+ characters top 50 words, here is a searchable table.