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It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; it matters about how much money you have. In the South Park episode “Here Comes the Neighborhood,” Token, the only African American child character in South Park, struggles to find a social group to which he can belong. His quest for acceptance satirizes the civil rights movement and ridicules racism and classism in America. These critiques on American society provide comic relief from the intensity of race relations, and they also expose society’s need to mock others who are dissimilar to them. In this episode of South Park, waves of very wealthy African American actors, entertainers, and athletes swarm the small town of South Park. Token lures these high powered celebrities to South Park through a fictitious advertisement in Forbes magazine that portrayed South Park as the Aspen of twenty years ago. The normal stereotypes of African Americans being poor and Caucasians being well off are reversed in this episode. All of the African Americans with the exception of Chef are portrayed as being white upper class citizens while all the South Park citizens are portrayed as being white trash. In Token’s song, in which he longs to be normal, he wishes “to have a three bedroom house, broken trucks on his lawn, and cut up hot dogs for lunch.” Token’s situation is ironic because he wishes to be part of the poor community, which is inferior to the life that he leads. It is ironic that the townspeople despise the new African American residents not because of the color of their skin, which is what would be expected, but because they are wealthy. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, use the fundamental technique of what is expected versus what actually happens to achieve most of the humor in this episode. This play on racism runs throughout the episode and is the main source of humor. A lot of racial humor in the episode stems from plays on words. Mr. Garrison refers to the African Americans as “cashchuckers” which appears as a harmless joke, but the name “cashchuckers” stems from the African American racist slang term spear chucker.
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