Le Petit Tourette

"Le Petit Tourette"

"Le Petit Tourette" is episode 1108 (#161) of Comedy Central's South Park. It was first broadcast on October 3, 2007. This episode marked the beginning of the second half of the eleventh season.

Plot

While shopping in Toy Safari, Cartman sees a boy named Thomas, who has Tourette syndrome. He continually shouts obscenities as his mother tries to explain to everyone that he is unable to control it. Cartman decides to pretend he has Tourette as well. He convinces his mother and the doctor, who diagnoses him with Tourette syndrome and notifies the school.

When Kyle finds out about Cartman's "disorder," he immediately figures out that he's faking, which Cartman quickly admits to him. Nevertheless Cartman continues to enjoy his newfound freedom, repeatedly shouting random curses to people, to Kyle's intense annoyance and Craig's jealousy. Kyle finally decides to complain to Principal Victoria that Cartman is faking. Unfortunately, at the moment, Principal Victoria is meeting Mr. Donaldson from the "Tourettes Tolerance and Understanding Foundation," who is insulted that Kyle would accuse people with Tourette syndrome of faking and takes him to a local support group for kids with the disorder. Kyle attempts to explain that he was referring only to Cartman, and not to others, but the kids are still insulted and tell him how hard it is living with the disorder.

Cartman then decides to appear on Dateline with Chris Hansen, who plans to document the "sad story" of Cartman living with the condition. Cartman calls Kyle over to his house to mock him, telling him that he plans to say "horrible, despicable" things on the air, including venomous insults against the Jews. Suddenly, he blurts out that he wet his bed, which stuns both Cartman and Kyle. Soon Cartman realizes that, having said everything completely unfiltered for so long, he has lost the ability to think before he speaks, and now merely says whatever comes into his head, including embarrassing secrets. He quickly tries to cancel the Dateline appointment, but Chris Hansen refuses to allow it and warns him that once, when a pedophile attempted to get out of appearing on his "To Catch a Predator" series, they hunted him down and he "shot himself", implying that Chris Hansen and Dateline murdered him in revenge for his failure to appear. Realizing he has no way to get out of going on the show, and that he still cannot control his self-inflicted Tourette syndrome, Cartman prays to God for some sort of aid.

Meanwhile, Kyle has teamed up with Thomas, who is now convinced Cartman is lying and that his appearance on the show will make others think Tourette's is "fun." In order to provide a distraction, the two team up and go on the Internet, enticing numerous pedophiles to come to the show. When the child molesters come into the studio and see Chris Hansen, they all assume it to be a bust and kill themselves, sending panic through the studio and forcing everyone to flee. Kyle then sneaks in and confronts Cartman. Cartman, overjoyed, embraces Kyle and cries into his shoulder, explaining that he wanted a miracle and Kyle must "really care" about him, and then runs off happily. Thomas and Kyle, both realizing that they had helped Cartman, scream "Aw shit!", concluding the episode.

Reaction

TSA reaction

Prior to the airing, the Tourette Syndrome Association (TSA) issued a press release saying they had requested that Comedy Central air their public service announcements during or after the show and that they "fully expect[ed] it to be offensive and insensitive to people with TS". The President of the TSA said, "[w]e are actually surprised it took the creators so long to use TS as comedy fodder in this program, since no disability, illness or controversial topic is off limits to them." Following the episode, they issued a second press release, expressing concern that the episode perpetuated the myth that most people with TS have coprolalia, when in fact, 85–90% of people with TS do not. They conceded that "the episode was surprisingly well-researched. The highly exaggerated emphasis on coprolalia notwithstanding, for the attentive viewer, there was a surprising amount of accurate information conveyed," adding that several elements of the episode "served as a clever device" for providing accurate facts to the public.

Reviews

The episode received relatively mixed reviews. The television weblog TV Squad were extremely positive, calling the episode "the stuff of brilliance". IGN gave the episode a rating of 7.5/10, asserting "this isn't the greatest episode, and not the greatest way to bring back the series - but it's got some great laughs and manages to push its single joke further than expected." 411mania took the middle ground, giving the show a 6.5/10 rating, calling it "hit and miss", and contesting that "while the first half of the show suffered because of a one-note joke, the second half showed why this series continues to remain one of the best on television." On the negative side, BuddyTv called the episode a "misfire", criticizing it as "disjointed and a little off-putting."

Censorship

This episode featured a higher than normal amount of curse words than are regularly featured. It is the fourth episode in the show's history to leave the word "shit" uncensored (the others being "It Hits the Fan", "Ike's Wee Wee", and "Christmas in Canada"). While all of the vulgarities, except for "fuck", were not bleeped as usual, most of the swear words are omitted or replaced with "obscenities" in the closed captioning.

Rating

For the first time in the show's history, an episode was rated TV-MA LV instead of the usual TV-MA; this was due to many uncensored uses of the words "shit", "kike", and "cock" and at least nine graphic gunshot suicides.