Photographs by Matthew Salacuse

Here are some things that Trey Parker and Matt Stone hate: Scientology, liberals, radical atheists, conservatives, the Motion Picture Association of America, Glenn Beck, the TV show Whale Wars, and Sean Penn. Also this interview. "We didn't do press for a long time," said Parker recently, sitting on a couch on the seventh floor of MTV's New York headquarters. "We were able to ride on the South Park thing. Then we had to do a big press push for The Book of Mormon. And for some reason, we're doing press again and it's really starting to piss me off. Right now."

"We've gotta quit doing these interviews. This is the last general Matt-and-Trey interview we're going to do," Stone said.

Parker and Stone disclose their disdain for talking to reporters with such openness, such gusto, such feeling, it's hard to be offended.

Which is, of course, their secret: Say something offensive but deliver it in the least offensive way possible. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Or in South Park terms, an anal probe disguised as a harmless poke.

Consider any episode of South Park in the past fifteen years. They've had shows featuring 162 mentions of the word shit. They've had a chain of humans sewed mouth-to-anus by Steve Jobs, may he rest in peace. They've featured a Richard Gere — inspired gerbil plot. But they've delivered the shiv via cute paper cutouts of big-eyed ten-year-olds.

Since March, they've been doing the same trick on Broadway. Their musical, The Book of Mormon, makes repeated references to baby-raping, mutilated genitals, and a Ugandan phrase meaning "Fuck you, God" — all sung with a Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-like joy and innocence that keeps Nebraska grandmothers in the audience tapping their toes. The result? Mormon has brought in $37 million and nine Tonys, and quite possibly rescued the Broadway-musical genre.

A decade and a half after these two film-class buddies from the University of Colorado began insulting everything we love about this great country, they've never been more adored. Consider this: Sean Penn trekked from Los Angeles or Port-au-Prince or Caracas or someplace to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre to chuckle through TheBook of Mormon. Twice. "It's one of the best things I've seen in a long time," Penn told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

We're talking Sean F-ing Penn here. In case you don't follow these things, the South Park duo and Penn have held each other in mutual contempt for years. Last year, Parker called Penn a "giant douchebag with legs running around Haiti." In their 2004 movie, Team America: World Police, they created a nasal-voiced Sean Penn puppet with an absurd adoration of preinvasion Iraq, which featured "rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced ... with gumdrop smiles."

Around that time, Penn wrote an open letter deriding Stone and Parker's cynicism, with the sign-off "All best, and a sincere fuck you."

Now Penn's a fanboy. Not that his newfound respect melted Parker's heart. "I have no desire to ever talk to Sean Penn," said Parker, who referred to the actor as "a little guy." But the fact remains, Penn loved the show.

"And Barbra Streisand came last night," Stone added. "The cast told me she was there, and I was like, 'No fucking way.'" You should know that South Park has repeatedly portrayed Streisand as a giant screechy-voiced robot that emits poisonous green gas from its vagina.

And reporters, too: Insult them and they're crazy for you.

Matthew Salacuse

Their "last interview" took place in a room off the MTV cafeteria. (Comedy Central, which airs South Park, is part of MTV Networks.) The room had a pool table, a platter of honeydew melon, and no discernible personality.

Parker and Stone (it's habitually Parker and Stone — perhaps because Parker is forty-two and Stone only forty — sometimes Stone and Parker, but almost never just Parker, or, rarest of all, just Stone) seemed tired but not grumpy. Parker had on a blue oxford shirt with purple cuffs. He is the more right-brained of the pair: the writer, the composer. Stone, the son of an economist, excels at story logic and business. He wore a brown leather jacket and chin stubble. Outside the door, a pack of publicists waited, along with Parker's girlfriend — a beautiful brunette with a neck tattoo and a Mohawkish hairstyle reminiscent of Bow Wow Wow's lead singer.

Inside, we discussed another trapping of success: Everyone wants to claim you for his own side. A couple of years ago, South Park mocked Glenn Beck as a conspiracy freak obsessed with protecting Smurfs. (It's complicated.) Beck was hurt.

"You know what's amazing to me," Beck said on his radio show, "I'm a libertarian. And they are, too. And when you're a libertarian, there ain't nobody coming to your defense."

I read Parker and Stone the transcript. They winced.

"Whatever libertarianism is, it's not Glenn Beck. It's barely us, but it's not Glenn Beck," Stone said.

"Whatever side Glenn Beck is on, we're not on it."

Parker and Stone abhor having their politics labeled, even by themselves. They're better at defining themselves in the negative. A few years ago, Stone said, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals." As for libertarians? They avoid the description, though they admit to some libertarian tendencies. On South Park, they've mocked Big Government (smoking bans, the drug war) and remain free-speech diehards. (Their biggest fight with Comedy Central was over an episode that was going to feature an image of the prophet Muhammad.)

But the truth is that Parker and Stone, the creators of the decade's most extreme mass entertainment, are shockingly ... temperate. They say it themselves: "There is a middle ground, and most of us actually live in this middle ground." Consider the short film that launched South Park — The Spirit of Christmas.

On one side, Jesus demanded that Christmas be about remembering His birthday. Santa shouted that Christmas was about giving. They kung-fu-battled until they were rolling on the ground, strangling each other.

"The boys were in the middle saying, 'This is fucked up,' " said Parker. "Any side who thinks they're totally right is fucked up. That's the heart of every show."

As they told In Focus magazine a few years ago, "What we're sick of — and it's getting even worse — is you either like Michael Moore or you wanna fuckin' go overseas and shoot Iraqis... We find just as many things to rip on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us."

Consider, too, The Book of Mormon. For a play that includes the insertion of a holy text up a missionary's rectum, it actually offers a nuanced view of religion. Mormonism may be odd, but it produces kind, thoughtful, mostly happy people. "They always look like they're just about to break out into song anyways," Stone has said.

Religion has its upsides — a position that rankles hardcore atheists such as Richard Dawkins.

"He's such a dick," said Stone. "You read his book and you're like, 'Yeah, I agree with that. But it's the most dicky way to put it... I think the neoatheists have set atheism back a few decades. And I'm a self-described atheist."

One of South Park'sbest episodes featured Dawkins as a substitute teacher who ends up having kinky sex with the boys' creationist teacher, Miss Garrison (formerly Mr. Garrison, pre-sex-change-operation). The show ended five hundred years in the future, when Dawkins-worshipping atheists are at war over whether their religion should be called the "United Atheist Alliance" or "Unified Atheist League."

You could argue that their so-called moderation is actually just nihilism. They take potshots at both sides without ever committing to any direction of their own. And there's some truth to that. So what do they believe in? The central thesis of The Book of Mormon is that storytelling, myths, and fiction are the only things that can save us.

The play follows two scrubbed Mormon missionaries assigned to a corner of Uganda rife with AIDS and warlords. The mission is a disaster until one of the Mormons starts improvising changes to Joseph Smith's story. For instance, he has Joseph Smith cure AIDS by fornicating with a frog. His revised story resonates with the Africans, who end up adopting it.

"I'm concerned about people being happy," said Stone. "With religion I was always like, Does it matter if it's true if it makes you happy?"

"As storytellers for fifteen years, we started looking at religions for their stories," Parker said.

Stone illustrated the idea with the Parable of the Hipster Coffee Guy. Recently, Stone was at a New York hotel that was trying very hard to be cool. It had stuffed animal heads on the walls and exposed brass pipes. "I don't know if Luddite is the right word, but it was back-to-basics. The guy making the coffee had a beard and tattoos. And I'm sitting there going, 'What the fuck. I'm too old for this. This is not my scene.' And then I drank the coffee, and I'm like, 'Holy shit. That's amazing.'

"And it made me think there's something about dressing up and playing the part. To me, that's religion. You can write down how to make the perfect cup of coffee. But to make it really good, you have to play something fictional, you have to dress up, you have to think, This is the most important thing."

He continued, "The pride of the hipster food movement is sort of annoying, but it fascinates me. And the by-products are fucking great."

(This story continues on next page...)

(Mormon) Joan Marcus; (Penn and South Park) Everett Collection

Clockwise: a scene in The Book of Mormon, Sean Penn as depicted (not nice) in the movie Team America: World Police, and a parody of the Dutch film The Human Centipede in an episode this season of South Park.

South Park debuted in 1997 with an episode in which Cartman gets anally probed by an alien. "It was so dopey, and small, and not threatening," Stone said. "The first year of South Park, people were saying" — he takes on a stentorian tone — " 'It's a threat to democracy.' Now they would air those episodes on Nick Jr. next to Yo Gabba Gabba! and Peppa Pig."

The themes have become timelier and more complex. They've taken on Walmart, immigration, homelessness, and terrorism. Cartman has evolved from a relatively inoffensive fat kid into the show's unchecked id. He's turned into a Hitler-admiring megalomaniac. "In the writer's room, Matt and I immediately know what Cartman would say. We just channel the most shitty, entitled, bitter side of us."

The one thing that has stayed constant is the structure of each episode: taking a joke and beating it into a bloody, unrecognizable pulp.

"There's the Family Guy structure, which is 'We're just going to keep doing crazy shit, and maybe there will be a thread through it, but it doesn't really matter,' " said Parker. "Our structure is, we'll come up with this funny thing, and then make this funny thing go on for twenty minutes. Sometimes it makes really crappy television and sometimes it makes cool television."

Often they won't know which for weeks. Parker especially seems prone to self-doubt and tortured nights. "I remember finishing the World of Warcraft show [in 2006] and I went home so depressed. I was like, 'This is the end. This is the most embarrassing, the most horrible piece of shit we've ever done, and everybody's going to rip on it.' And then the next day, people are like, 'Wow, that was awesome.' And I'm like, 'What? You people are fucking crazy.'"

Now they worry that they're aging. A few months ago, they needed to think of a popular new song for a South Park scene. "I was like, 'What's a hip song? Van Halen? Journey?' All our references are, like, twenty years old," Stone said.

In September, they told The New York Times they thought their most creative days were behind them. "I can feel myself dying inside," Parker said.

And Parker especially says his worldview has darkened. "I was always a very happy, optimistic person," he said in the little room off the cafeteria. "I've only become an angry person in the last two years. I'm becoming Carl Sagan. I used to be like, 'Oh, the wonders of the universe.' Now I'm starting to say, 'Humanity's fucked. The universe is going to collapse on itself. Everyone's doomed.' I think it's just getting older."

Stone, on the other hand, claimed that he's a "techno-optimist," a less extreme version of Ray Kurzweil who believes that humans will merge with technology around 2045 to create a superrace. "We just have to make it through the next couple of hundred years and we'll be fine."

Stone is now married to his longtime girlfriend and has a one-year-old son. Parker's girlfriend has a ten-year-old son.

They addressed their aging in one of this year's strongest episodes, "You're Getting Old." As soon as Stan turns ten years old, he can no longer enjoy "tween" music. All tween songs sound like farts to him. A doctor diagnoses Stan as a "cynical asshole."

Parker and Stone usually mock people for strong beliefs. But in this episode, apathy is portrayed as evil.

"I told them, 'I'm so proud of the men you're becoming,' " said South Park's executive producer, Anne Garefino. "I've been waiting for years." Garefino, who also coproduced Mormon, has no idea what the boys (men) will do next. "Most people in Hollywood have dozens of things in development at one time. Matt and Trey like to do one thing at a time, and do it well."

Or to be precise, two things. For seven years, they alternated between The Book of Mormon and South Park.

Parker and Stone say they don't know what's next, either. In seven years, will we see a Dianetics-based Broadway show? Probably not, for fear of being pigeonholed as the "guys who make musicals about religion." Same with a Koran-based one. "You might have trouble getting people to invest in that," Stone said. "I would watch it, though."

So what then?

"I'm almost starting to think I could make a movie again," said Parker. "I'm almost over the taste of shit in my mouth from Team America, and how horrible that experience was" — battles with the MPAA, twenty-hour days, marionette-budget overruns, etc.

Parker is thinking live action. Will it be a drama? "I hope not," he said. "I don't want to say never, but I hope I don't become that 'take me seriously now' guy. I can see it happening, and I'll probably eat these words when I'm fifty and making a drama."

Whatever the project is, it'll probably involve something they hate. And please don't ask them to do any damn press.

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