One of the greatest South Park Christmas specials stole a joke from one of the show’s most hated outings. South Park tends to get in trouble when the show gets too ambitious. The curse of a satirical series that mocks people for caring about things is that when an episode has a lot of effort and care put into it, it is often met with mockery by South Park’s fan base. Take, for example, South Park season 4, episode 14, “Pip.” An ambitious retelling of the classic Charles Dickens bildungsroman Great Expectations, “Pip” is devoted to the backstory of the titular annoying English kid glimpsed in earlier episodes.
Devoting an entire episode to Pip might sound like a bad idea, particularly when South Park making Randy a main character caused storytelling problems and that supporting star was already a bigger part of the show than Pip. However, the broadly negative reception of “Pip” is still notable, considering how much work went into the episode. South Park co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker admitted that they spent a lot of time, money, and effort making “Pip” happen, only for the fan base to almost universally reject it. As a result, the episode remains one of South Park’s lowest-rated outings online and frequently appears in the show’s worst episode rundowns.
South Park’s Woodland Critter Christmas Explained
However, although “Pip” is mainly viewed as a misguided failure by South Park viewers, the episode did inspire the funniest gag in a later, well-loved Christmas special. While South Park’s best Christmas special in years revived the show’s social commentary with an insightful satire of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, the show’s best holiday special before this outing took the opposite approach. South Park season 8, episode 14, “Woodland Critter Christmas,” was a rare episode of the series that has nothing to do with contemporary events. Instead, “Woodland Critter Christmas” is a parody of Disney movies that gets progressively darker until its ludicrous punchline reveals a twist ending.
“Woodland Critter Christmas” sees Stan help a group of adorable endangered animals decorate their Christmas tree. Stan soon saves the creatures from a mountain lion and helps them ward off further danger as the animals tell him that one of them is pregnant with their savior. Of course, South Park’s greatest curse is the show’s edginess, so no longtime viewer will be surprised to learn that the animals are secretly Satanists and their savior is the antichrist. Stan finds himself compelled to keep helping these murderous monsters by a pushy narrator and, after the episode reveals why “Woodland Critter Christmas” steals its final punchline directly from South Park’s much-hated “Pip.”
How South Park Stole Its Own Joke
At the end of “Pip,” Malcolm McDowell’s narration announces that the entire cast of characters lived happily ever after “except for Pocket, who died of hepatitis B.” It’s a bracing, brutal joke, and one that is lifted wholesale in “Woodland Critter Christmas,” when Cartman is revealed to be the episode’s narrator. In the show’s darkest Christmas special since South Park’s earliest origins, “The Spirit of Christmas,” Cartman announces that the characters of “Woodland Critter Christmas” all lived happily ever after at the story’s end, “except for Kyle, who died of AIDS.”
Why South Park’s Pip Is So Hated
While the two gags are essentially the same joke, “Woodland Critter Christmas” received a far warmer welcome from fans than “Pip.” Ironically, “Woodland Critter Christmas” was an episode that Stone and Parker admitted was rushed and written while the pair were running out of ideas, while “Pip” was an ambitious outing they committed a lot of effort to. This disparity might explain why “Pip” is so hated, as the episode tries to do too much for a single twenty-minute outing. South Park is a silly series that mocks everyone and everything, so attempting to faithfully recreate a Victorian novel in 20 minutes may have been too ambitious for the show’s remit.
Why Woodland Critter Christmas’s Ending Gag Worked
While the best Simpsons Christmas episodes lean into the show’s sweeter side, South Park’s strongest festive offerings focus on the meaner elements of what makes the series work. Christmas specials are expected to be sweet, so South Park’s creators naturally go out of their way to subvert this staid, safe television convention. Making Cartman the narrator of “Woodland Critter Christmas” makes the surprise death of Kyle a brutal, but contextually appropriate, gag that funnels Cartman’s hate of his classmate into hilariously unnecessary death. In contrast, the ending of “Pip” didn’t work as well because, like the rest of the hated South Park episode, the gag didn’t play off the show’s main characters.
