The Art of Ridicule: Team America – World Police

The ‘South Park’ guys put on an R-rated puppet show.

I saw Team America: World Police on opening night in October 2004 with my roommate. We were in our mid-twenties at the time, so it’s probably not surprising that both of us were fairly big South Park fans and eager to see what Trey Parker and Matt Stone would do with an R-rated puppet movie.

We laughed at every crass joke, cheering particularly loud at the theme song and its lyrics of “America! F–k yeah!” We snickered at the marionette sex scene, which went on for an uncomfortably long time and consists of basically smashing two Barbie dolls together in various positions. I doubled over and clutched my stomach at its depiction of Kim Jong Il, whose standout solo was punctuated by him constantly tripping up his “l’s” and “r’s.” Ho-ho!

I’m not going to hide it – revisiting it for the first time since that viewing, I didn’t find Team America as riotously funny and trenchant. Maybe I’m growing up.

Parker and Stone’s sophomoric film is an action comedy made with marionettes; think “Thunderbirds” meets The Sum of All Fears. The titular team is a group of American super agents who head around the world killing terrorists and saving the day – usually toppling landmarks and world wonders as they do. When they must infiltrate a terrorist organization, they turn to Gary, a Broadway actor, because his acting is the only superpower that can save America and keep weapons of mass destruction out of terrorists’ hands.

In the 21 years following Team America’s release, I remembered it as a post-9/11 skewering of steroidal patriotism, putting the country’s position as the world’s policemen in its satirical crosshairs. Watching it again, its commentary is half-baked and Stone and Parker’s “both-siderism” blunts the impact, leaving a film that ridicules everyone but makes very few points¹.

That’s not to say I didn’t laugh. There are some very funny jokes scattered throughout. Its very aesthetic is a great gag on its own. Parker and Stone really spent $32 million in studio money to make a marionette film – one of its best gags is that the movie opens with a shoddy puppet show only to pull back and reveal an elaborate Parisian cityscape. The movie often pokes fun at itself – there’s inherent humor in a sex scene where the puppets are smooth between the legs, and the “weapon” Gary is given to take his life should he end up in the terrorists’ hands gets a big laugh. But mostly the joke is that it’s a really well-made puppet movie with incredibly impressive miniature sets and models all in service of incredibly puerile humor.

Team America is funniest not as political satire but as a jab at bloated action movies. It’s not a coincidence one of its songs calls out Michael Bay and Pearl Harbor by name. This uses low-tech storytelling to roast mega budgeted action thrillers, reveling in recreating Bay and Roland Emmerich’s fetish for destroying major cities for our amusement. The Eiffel Tower topples to the ground in the film’s opening moments. The Sphinx takes a missile to the face in the climax. The Louvre is decimated. Aside from the fact that these are puppets causing the damage, I could imagine very similar scenes in a Transformers². It’s a funny gag, made more impressive by Stone and Parker’s commitment to the bit; this film must have been a nightmare to make, and they go for several intricate sequences.

I’d forgotten that Team America’s biggest target is not the American military, but rather Hollywood’s performative politicism. Its harshest barbs are reserved for celebrities like Sean Penn, George Clooney, Michael Moore and – in the film’s funniest gag – Matt Damon, and their eagerness to get in front of cameras and rally for popular causes. There’s a sense in a lot of Parker and Stone’s work that they feel uncomfortable being lumped in with celebrity culture – there’s probably a Gen X mentality of not wanting to be seen as a sell-out – and they have fun letting a little of the air out of the tires out of limousine liberalism. And there’s a good subtext running through about creative arrogance and the belief that these people should be listened to just because they appear on giant screens; I laughed a lot at all the times Gary’s acting is discussed in hushed tones, as if it’s a super power.

Stone and Parker’s criticism of Hollywood self-importance is funny but too often also seems to make fun of people for the crime of caring. The duo has long been criticized for their chainsaw approach to satire, rather than a scalpel. They’re salt-the-Earth-humorists, ridiculing everyone and everything in their path. And while the “equal opportunity offender” approach is sometimes wise – defusing anyone from any argument of bias – the offense actually isn’t equal here. The celebrities get nothing but ridicule – Michael Moore becomes a terrorist bomber and Team America actually has to fight and kill the American celebs in the end because they’re so “blinded” by their do-gooderness that they’re actually siding with Kim Jong Il. Again, that’s not to say liberals haven’t often hurt their own self-interest in their virtue signaling – they have, and they continue to do so! – but the repeated joke seems to be that they care and they’re opposed to killing bad guys; what wussies! The fact that Parker and Stone group them under the title Film Actors Guild – and then use its acronym several times as a homophobic joke – continues the ridicule.

By contrast, the filmmakers’ criticisms of American self-centeredness and tendency to wade into global conflicts has slightly more nuance. The film does poke fun at America seeing itself as the center of the world – a clever gag always highlights how many miles from America the movie’s foreign settings are. And the gibberish dialogue the film thinks up for any foreign characters could be seen either as offensive or as a sly joke about Americans’ tendency to stereotype and dismiss foreigners as a faceless threat (I think there’s a bit of both). But the film argues that while America can be a bit of a prick, that prickishness is needed because it puts the jerks in their place and protects the wusses from being crapped on (there’s an entire elaborate and vulgar metaphor the film uses, but this is a family newsletter). Whether I agree with Stone and Parker – and I’m not quite sure I do³ – their decision to go layered here while turning every other character into targets for one-dimensional mockery feels lopsided and unfair. The bullies get a defense; everyone else is just laughed at for having an opinion. It’s been many, many years since I’ve watched South Park, but I remember that mentality creeping in there over time as well.

The film’s offensiveness is also exhausting. I don’t want to suggest I’m a prude; I like directors who can be a bit edgy, and I’ve spent much of my time as a critic lauding the work of Kevin Smith, Judd Apatow and others who make R-rated comedies. Stone and Parker often are funny and outrageous. I think The South Park Movie weaponizes shock humor in a way that also makes it the point of the entire enterprise. But the all-out assault here is numbing and juvenile in a way that blunts its the film’s attempts to make an actual impact.

The film introduces Gary singing in a play called Lease, a parody of Rent whose main song has the repeated chorus “Everyone has AIDS.” I guess there’s a joke about Broadway jumping onto that crisis and the earnestness of Rent, but it doesn’t work aside from shock value. There are vomit jokes, sex jokes, racist gags and (many, many) homophobic gags. Like I said earlier, the entire joke on Kim Jong Il rests on an offensive Asian stereotype. It’s juvenile and dumb, and often not in a way that is commenting on those things. But then again, by complaining about it, I’m just an overly sensitive critic who’s taking the puppet movie too seriously. Parker and Stone just want to be seen as cut-ups until they have a point to make, but they can’t make their point because – to paraphrase The Incredibles – when everyone’s a target, no one is.

I know this movie has its fans. I get it. Stone and Parker are talented, even if they seem eager to always be seen as the kids lobbing spitballs from the back of the class. I liked those early seasons of South Park, as well as the movie and The Book of Mormon. And sometimes Team America did make me laugh. But more often than not, it came not from a place where I found the jokes clever or insightful; it was that lizard-brained part of me from my 20s laughing at something he knew he shouldn’t. I’d pretend to care, but that would probably get me made fun of by the film’s creators.

1. I know this series is The Art of Ridicule, and I’m about to heavily criticize this movie. I think that’s fair; sometimes in revisiting a movie, you realize it doesn’t hold up, and you need to address why it doesn’t work to suggest what could work.

2. And what are the Transformers anyway but digital puppets?

3. This film actually has the whiplash of feeling both resonant in its depiction of American egocentrism as well as dated in an age where we’re abandoning our allies and any responsibility to protect other nations.