Thursday, May 18, 2023

South Park's Philip Performs Hamlet

"Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow." By Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and David R. Goodman. Perf. Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Eliza Schneider. Dir. Trey Parker. South Park. Season 5, episode 5. Comedy Central. 18 July 2001. DVD. 
Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015
While we're on something of a "Shakespeare in various animated works," we might as well go on down to South Park and see Phillip perform as Hamlet in Hamlet.

Phillip is part of a famous comedy duo (within the world of South Park) called Terrance and Phillip. They are known for their over-the-top scatological humor. 

In this episode, that team has broken up, Terrence trying to continue the act with a replacement Phillip and Phillip pursuing what might be termed more serious drama (though there's plenty of scatological humor in Shakespeare). The South Park kids are trying to get the duo back together for a reunion concert, so they travel to Canada to try to convince Phillip to rejoin the act. Here's what they find:


As you've seen, what they find is a fairly-straightforward production of Hamlet—with some Canadianisms thrown in. The humor relies on knowing that Phillip is much more inclined to make a gross fart joke than to play Hamlet.

That's different from the humor involved in the episode with the turkeys who quote from Henry V (for which, q.v.).

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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