"I Made You Eat Your Parents!" South Park and Literary History

Abstract

In the "Scott Tenorman Must Die" episode of South Park, Eric Cartman's act of revenge against Scott - where we see Scott unwittingly eat his own parents served up by Cartman in a bowl of chili - and his triumphant taunting of Scott, "Na, na, na, na, na. I made you eat your parents!" are uncannily familiar. This scene is an example of a well-used literary motif of a special kind of revenge in which the revenger takes vengeance by tricking the unwitting victim into an act of incestuous cannibalism: in other words the victim innocently eats a relative or relatives cooked up and served as a special meal. The double transgression of this act is crucial to, in fact exquisitely heightens, the sweetness of the revenge. Here South Park locates itself in a representational history where cannibalism functions as a metaphor for a society whose appetites are out of control and whose moral framework is disintegrating. And Cartman takes his place in a long line of revengers for whom cannibalism offers the most perfect form of vengeance. Incest cannibalism is usually performed as the bloody climax of escalating acts of revenge. Central to this motif is the eaten body and the gruesome corporeal violations and manipulations that culinary preparations demand in a revenge economy where the human body has symbolic currency. This chapter sets out the literary history of the use of this motif and explores how the creators of South Park deploy the motif - coming to them as it does sufficiently gory for their Purposes and already infused with ideological and metaphorical meaning.