A few days ago (April 25) the author of the book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias visited the MSNBC show “Scarborough Country”. (You can view video of the discussion: go here, then enter “South Park” into the search bar. Hat tip: Ivan.)

Much as I admire the marketing chutzpah of the book’s title, the tv show South Park is not – culturally or politically -- conservative. It is the opposite of culturally conservative: it goes out of its way to be outrageous. Cultural conservatives are oblivious to popular culture, but South Park is entirely clued in. (Scarborough shows a clip of Barbra Streisand as MechaGodzilla, defeated by Robert Smith of the Cure as Ultraman. Genius.) Would cultural conservatives create a talking piece of feces (“Mr. Hankey”) to represent the spirit of Christmas? Give a fourth-grade teacher (Mr. Garrison) a leatherbound gay lover (Mr. Slave)? Lampoon church doctrine that the mentally handicapped can’t get into heaven? If you’ve watched the show, you know the list goes on and on.

More than anything else, South Park’s politics is libertarian. In my favorite episode, “Underpants Gnomes” (unauthorized script here) from Season 2, the owner of a local coffee shop (Mr. Tweak) wants to keep a giant coffee chain (“Harbucks”) from opening a shop in South Park to compete with him, so he writes an anti-globalization screed for our gradeschooler heroes to pass off as their own term paper. The lesson, as Kyle and Stan spell it out when they come clean:

Kyle: Big corporations are good! […] Because without big corporations we wouldn't have things like cars and computers and canned soup. Stan: Even Harbucks Coffee started off as a small, little business. But because it made such great coffee, and because they ran their business so well, they managed to grow and grow until it became the corporate powerhouse it is today. And that is why we should all let Harbucks stay!

There’s also a subplot, involving gnomes who steal underpants, the lesson of which is: you can’t make a profit without a coherent business plan.

The key comedic insights of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park and Team America, are that (1) nothing is funnier than deflating the sanctimonious, and (2) the most sanctimonious people these days are mostly liberals.