Kanye West must’ve spit out his fish sticks if he watched the February 8th episode of South Park, which kicked off Season 26 with the satire of Ye’s antisemitic conspiracies.
“Cupid Ye” finds Cartman and Stan wrestling with jealousy over Kyle’s friendship with Tolkien, especially their popular TikTok series. Stan is content to sulk, but Cartman decides to drive a Star of David-shaped wedge between the school’s few Black and Jewish students. “It’s awesome that someone like you could be ok with someone like him, given all the new information lately,” Cartman tells Tolkien in band class. “You know, the stuff about how the Jews stole the Black’s racial identity? That the lost tribes of Judah were all Africans?”
At this point in band practice, Cartman literally toots his own horn. “You didn’t hear about this? Black people are actually the Jews and people like Kyle have taken that from them?” These talking points are cribbed from the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose views have been espoused by Ye and Kyrie Irving, among other prominent entertainers. Those details are quickly lost, but soon the whole school is parroting the idea that “Kyle runs Hollywood.”
Related Video
Cartman gives interviews on television wearing the exact same outfit worn by Ye during his Hitler-praising appearance on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, and he also talks with a “magic fairy,” the Cupid Ye of the title, who is always “busy praising our savior’s name in the music studio.” Even Cartman is skeptical here. “Ever since you changed your name and got all into Jesus, you got a little batshit crazy, Cupid Ye.” It’s hard to disagree.
In her Consequence review of Season 26, Kayleigh Donaldson wrote, “The jokes are consistent but not as scathing as the series can be. The best laughs come from the gang’s absolute bafflement and Kyle and Tolkien’s TikToks, a gag that will feel painfully relatable to anyone over the age of 17. Randy’s rant about ‘woke Hollywood’ will inevitably be taken out-of-context by the usual suspects, but it works well when you realize this is a grown man blaming a pre-teen for Avatar 2.”
