South Park Review: City Sushi

This is entirely spoilers because that is how lazy people write.

A Butters' story usually revolves around a misunderstanding and then being taken advantage of. Here he is taken advantage of by a therapist who diagnoses Butters with multiple personalities, with the misunderstanding being "he is just a kid who pretend-plays". It is believable because, more so than any other character on South Park, Butters is overflowing with innocence and naivety.

That's half the episode though. No Cartman, Kyle, Stan, or Kenny in this episode. But a longer look at City Wok's Lu Kim. The schtick here is that Chinese people get confused with Japanese people. South Park makes this touchy subject funny by relentless commitment to the joke, over the top accents, and focusing more on the character we know, Lu Kim, rather than developing the new City Sushi owner.

This all pays off in an amalgam of a third act. Butters' therapist at this point is the real crazy person with multiple personality disorder, and one of those personalities is Lu Kim. All this time, throughout the history of Lu Kim (Mongolians, his wife Wing), he was a white guy. This also justifies the racist attitudes he had of his Japanese counterpart (who killed himself, because honestly- we don't need to see that character again, they needed to get rid of City Sushi, and The Kenny Rule: it's always funnier on South Park when someone dies).

For a Butters' episode, I was semi-disappointed if only in the fact the worst thing Butters was led to do was rob a bank. While I also appreciate the backstory on Lu Kim, this is very Armen Tamzarian-esque. There was something about stereotypes that they could've hit harder, though. Stereotypes is a thing not easily solved and South Park makes enough points already. So for them, bringing light to this issue (by exploiting it) is just piling on jokes. Which is why I watch.