South Park: Pee

Juvenile humor. Disgusting sight gags. Cartman being a panicky bigot. Randy Marsh turning into a babbling idiot. These are some of my favorite things about South Park. The thirteenth season of the show, which concluded its second half tonight, has been a troubled one. The episodes of the past few weeks have been especially lackluster, often trying too hard to make some satirical point about politics or culture at the detriment of actual laughs. Tonight's episode left that all behind to capitalize on all the heavy (and mostly negative) press surrounding Roland Emmerich's latest awful disaster flick 2012. Oh, a deliver pee jokes. A lot of pee jokes. One might say this episode was a veritable stream of pee jokes (sorry).

South Park has always been at its strongest when it mixes light pop culture with mundane absurdities like the idiosyncratic behavior of school children. Tonight's episode locked on to the common (and gross) reality that everyone, at one time, has loosed his or her bladder into a public pool. Taken to its surreal extreme in this episode, the idea of an entire water park full of people peeing in pools results in a nonsensical disaster that turns the park into a miniature apocalypse.

Not since the sewer-centric days of the old Mr. Hanky episodes has South Park relied so much on unabashed gross-out humor, but I'll be damned if it didn't work. Kyle was the unfortunate target of a lot of these bits, suffering through a urine-soaked hell for our amusement. He had to listen to everyone's unhygienic habits, swim in the stuff and eventually drink a beaker full in preparation for a deep-pee diving finale that (sadly?) never materialized. It was borderline retch-inducing, but I appreciate that South Park can still be shockingly disgusting after thirteen years.

To pad things out, Cartman got to exercise some of his well-documented racism when he realized that most of the people at the water park were non-white. His tearful ballad joins this season's impressive, funny musical numbers like Kanye West's "Gay Fish" song and his nightmare of the minority-controlled future was amusing. I could think of worse ways to fill the empty space of an episode.

The third and most essential part of "Pee" was another one of Randy Marsh's freak-outs. He's on site at the police barricade around the destroyed water park and he's on hand for one of the better running gags of the season. I can now say that I've seen a cartoon of a scientist peeing on a monkey. Thank you, South Park.

Best Moment: The monkey segments were awesome. The conceit was just random enough to work.

Notes: Pi Pi the Venetian water park owner was a great character. I hope he shows up now and then in Season 14.

Episode Rating: 4.5/5- There was nothing particularly innovative about this episode, but it delivered on many of South Park's time-tested hallmarks. Not a bad way to end a season, especially one that seemed to be losing its edge.