Washington Dc, United States, March 21 2025:President Donald Trump stops to speak with media before boarding Marine 1, Image via Shutterstock.
Comedian Patton Oswalt is outspoken against President Donald Trump's "mediocrity" and "MAGA-friendly comedians," but he also offers some insight as to why the president has remained so uncharacteristically silent on the sordid skewering he receives on cartoon hit South Park, The Daily Beast reports.
Oswalt, whose latest standup special Black Coffee and Ice Water streams on Audible on Nov. 20, captures this "cultural moment," they write, "where many comedians are struggling to nail the proper tone when it comes to what Oswalt readily calls America’s 'authoritarian government.'"
What gives Oswalt hope, he says, is that Trump has a "short attention span."
"Whatever horrible thing happens will usually happen for a week, and then they’ll move on to whatever the next horrible thing is they want to do,” Oswalt says, “Our only advantage is hopefully we can out-create and out-pivot them because they seem to have no object permanence.”
And while Trump, Oswalt says, "is birthing something really evil," he also says that the president's silence on "South Park" speaks volumes.
After Paramount (CBS's parent company) settled a lawsuit with Trump for $16 million over claims of deceptive editing in a 2020 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, late night host Stephen Colbert mocked Paramount's decision on-air, calling the payment a "big, fat bribe" intended to curry favor with the Trump administration during a pending merger.
Shortly after, Paramount/CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, effective in May 2026, citing "purely financial" reasons.
Yet Trump has said nothing about South Park, which shows him in a laughably lurid, unflattering light.
"Nothing shuts Trump up like money. He can argue that Stephen Colbert isn’t getting the ratings and isn’t making the money, even though the show is brilliant," Oswalt says.
The creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have secured multiple lucrative deals for the franchise, including a five-year streaming deal with Paramount for $1.5 billion, valued at $300 million annually.
"And South Park, not only does it make insane amount of some money, it gets insane ratings. And Trump can only be so angry at that, because what Trump ultimately will respect, even if it doesn’t respect him, is something where the numbers are through the roof, and the money is through the roof," Oswalt explains.
"He can’t look at South Park and see how brilliant it is, and he can’t look at something like John Oliver and see how equally brilliant it is. All he can think of in terms of, look at this guy’s numbers, look at their numbers, and that’s the only way he sees the world," he adds.
Parker and Stone also have an overall production deal with Paramount that guarantees a minimum of $250 million per year through 2030, and while they have always been politically incorrect, they also have their fingers on the pulse of the modern day political zeitgeist.
"It's not that we got all political... It's that politics became pop culture," Parker says.
It also became profitable.
"So something that is as massive and as undeniable as South Park, both in quality, which people like you and I can see, but then in numbers and money, which Trump can see, he just falls silent. If Colbert was making South Park money and getting South Park eyes on him, Trump wouldn’t know what to do," Oswalt says.