Before President Trump became a central character in the currently airing 27th season, Mr. Garrison became a stand-in for then-just Donald Trump when he launched a xenophobic campaign built on vulgarity and absurd promises in season 19. The parody of Trump’s meteoric rise to political power was then prophetic, foreshadowing and accurate. This is now being one-up’d in the current season, where Trump himself has been wooing his boo, Satan, as he annihilates the town of South Park in a legal showdown.  

In this early-in-the-series celebrity satire, Barbra Streisand — one of Parker and Stone’s least-favorite celebs — discovers a mystical artifact and transforms into a towering Godzilla-like cyborg. Only a crack team of her celebrity allies — Leonard Maltin, Sidney Poitier and Robert Smith of The Cure — can stop her rampage. This premiere episode showcased Parker and Stone’s gleeful celebrity savagery, earning the celebrity icon’s disdain and a fan-favorite cult following.

At a cultural diversity event, Eric Cartman’s hand becomes possessed by “Jennifer Lopez” — complete with an offensive Latin accent. The hand-puppet “Ms. Lopez” then steals her fiancé Ben Affleck’s heart as the doppelganger’s career usurps the real J-Lo’s, enraging her and driving her to attempted murder of the offensive mitt. Lopez’s early 2000s persona and megastardom gets a strange-even-for-South Park treatment here. And “Taco-flavored kisses” will live on as a viral pop-culture relic.

Kyle wrestles with guilt after watching The Passion of the Christ, while Cartman rallies townsfolk into a Hitler-esque fan club for Mel Gibson. Stan and Kenny meet the actor and filmmaker, who descends into slapstick madness. Gibson’s controversial film became a comedic punching bag with this episode, with the South Park boys amplifying critiques of its violence and Gibson’s public meltdowns.

Michael Jackson, disguised as “Mr. Jefferson,” moves with his son to South Park, where his bizarre and childlike behavior and personality delights the boys but begins to alarm the town’s adults. Chaos erupts when Kenny, dressed as Jackson’s child, Blanket, meets a tragic and slapstick ending. The parody blurred comedy and the growing public unease over Jackson’s eccentricity and scandal-ridden behavior in his adult life.

Fan-favorite classmate Jimmy invents a joke about “fish sticks” that the entire world finds hilarious — except rapper-producer Kanye West, who can’t grasp the wordplay. His ego spirals until he embraces life as a literal “gay fish.” The gag went viral beyond the confines of the show, embedding “gay fish” into meme culture and lampooning West’s thin-skinned reputation.

Daytime TV icon Oprah Winfrey’s neglected body parts, Minge and Gary, plot revenge while she interviews South Park’s resident anthropomorphized towel, Towelie, and soon enough, their uprising devolves into a bizarre hostage crisis. Though divisive among fans, it became infamous for its grotesque audacity — proof that no cultural figure, not even the queen of daytime TV, was off limits.

Famous-for-nothing heiress Paris Hilton opens a store in South Park, glamorizing her specific brand of vapid, hypersexualized fame for young girls. Wendy fights back, while Mr. Slave defeats Hilton in an unforgettably grotesque endurance contest. The takedown aired at the height of America’s fascination with Hilton, sparking debate about celebrity role models and the excess of reality-TV fame.

Al Gore was parodied as a climate alarmist in this episode as he warns the boys about the fictional monster ManBearPig, then-climate skeptics Parker and Stone’s stand-in for environmentalism hysteria. Gore’s warning was initially dismissed as a joke, but ManBearPig returned in two season 22 episodes, “Time to Get Cereal” and “Nobody Got Cereal?,” where the boys now realize years later that ManBearPig exists and Gore receives an apology. Released around the time of his hit documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the parody of Gore’s climate change politics has aged into a sobering reminder of warnings that go ignored. 

Actor Russell Crowe hosts a children’s TV show where he travels the globe picking fights with strangers, all accompanied by his tugboat “Tugger.” The episode is merciless as it exaggerates Crowe’s much-publicized real-life temper, making “fightin’ around the world” a shorthand for unwarranted celebrity rage.

Nearly every celebrity parodied by South Park returns to sue the town, with Tom Cruise leading the charge and Mel Gibson and Barbra Streisand resurfacing outrageously and offensively. These heavily censored episodes became legendary flashpoints — fusing satire with free-speech battles that came after real-world death threats.

After a failed suicide attempt leaves the pop star disfigured, Britney Spears is paraded by the media and townsfolk as a sideshow act. The boys witness her exploitation with growing horror. This is one of South Park’s more bleak parodies; it indicts America’s appetite for celebrity self-destruction while mirroring the mid-2000s tabloid frenzy that ended with Spears being placed under a conservatorship.

A thinly veiled Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tour the globe, demanding privacy while promoting a tell-all memoir. Their hypocrisy becomes a neighborhood nightmare. This parody of the contentious couple lit up headlines and reflected the fatigue over the couple’s media ubiquity and reignited debates about monarchy and fame.

Real-life team owner Dan Snyder is portrayed as desperate and furious when the boys launch a startup named The Washington Redskins after the NFL loses the trademark. The episode amplified criticism of Snyder and the NFL’s hypocrisy, injecting South Park into ongoing debates over sports branding.

This episode inspired by the format of the thriller series 24, has terrorists planting a bomb inside Hillary Clinton. Jack Bauer–style antics collide with South Park absurdity. With this one, Parker and Stone satirized post-9/11 paranoia and lampooned Clinton as both oblivious and oddly sympathetic.

Okay, so technically this one’s a caveat — it’s from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999) and not the series proper. But when George Clooney lends his A-list voice to play the smugly serious Dr. Gouache, the U.S. Army surgeon treating Kenny’s flaming intestines, it absolutely counts. Clooney had already been a fan — he famously voiced Stan’s dog Sparky in an earlier episode — so his cameo as a stern, hyper-professional doctor is a sly bit of stunt casting. It works because Clooney is the epitome of gravitas, and dropping that gravitas into the middle of a foul-mouthed cartoon musical makes the joke land even harder. His appearance proved that even Hollywood’s leading men weren’t above hopping aboard the South Park train.

Cartman outsources the filtering of his online insults, sparking a charity drive run by Steven Seagal and other beleaguered celebs desperate for positive PR. The episode lampooned safe-space culture and exposed celebrities’ fragile egos under the guise of philanthropy.

Voiced in Parker’s goofy falsetto, the Iraqi dictator appears as Satan’s abusive, manipulative lover across a chunk of the earlier seasons of the series, and brilliantly in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. By emasculating a dictator into a needy boyfriend, South Park turned geopolitical terror into an absurdist farce.

Following his much-publicized cheating scandal, golf sensation Tiger Woods appears here in a video game where his wife attacks him with golf clubs. The episode parodies public obsession with celebrity sex lives, and the gag nails media and our own fixation on scandal, especially in the world of sports.

The Game of Thrones creator and prolific author appears as a perverse eccentric obsessed with “wieners,” stalling the boys’ fantasy saga while the epic HBO series drags on without resolution. This episode skewered Martin at the height of his power over fanboys and reflected their growing frustration with his endless delays in completing his landmark series.

“You didn’t read the terms and conditions?” Kyle signs Apple’s user agreement without reading it and ends up in a grotesque “HumancentiPad” experiment overseen by the late Apple CEO. The gag heightened paranoia over tech giants and user exploitation.

Amazon overlord Bezos is portrayed here as an alien overlord who is telepathically controlling the online retailer while exploiting its workers. This lampoon crystallized fears of corporate monopoly and created Bezos as an eerie and unforgettable villain.

Leave it to South Park to reduce one of the world’s most self-serious rock stars to literal excrement. In the season 11 episode “More Crap,” Parker and Stone take aim at U2 frontman Bono, portraying him as a man whose obsession with being “number one” is so pathological that it turns out he’s not even human — he’s just a giant piece of crap. The twist plays against Bono’s public persona as a do-gooder with an ego problem, skewering the tension between his undeniable influence and his relentless need for recognition. By the time Randy Marsh challenges him in an epic bowel-movement showdown, South Park has made its point: Bon is full of himself.

Caitlyn Jenner is introduced as a new political running mate for Kyle’s dad; she’s portrayed as reckless behind the wheel, constantly causing accidents (Jenner was involved in a four-car pile-up in 2015). While the show acknowledged Jenner’s bravery in living an authentic life as a transgender woman, it also refused to handle her with kid gloves, applying the same savagery it doles out to everyone else. The gag stirred controversy but also reflected the show’s insistence on treating all celebrities equally.