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South Park is one of the four large intermountain basins that characterize the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. This chapter discusses the landscape, climate, flora, and vegetation of South Park, which features large regional variation in elevation and an assortment of bedrock types. Well-developed alpine tundra occurs on the highest mountains, and tundra plants are highly specific to substrate chemistry, with different plant species and distinctive plant communities occurring on acid and alkaline soils. Numerous forest types, dominated by evergreen and deciduous trees, occur on mountain slopes. The floor of South Park supports four principal natural environments: (1) grasslands on dry terraces, slopes, and hills with deep water tables; (2) streams and their floodplains; (3) wetlands fed by groundwater; and (4) salt flats.

Porcupine Cave is located at the southern end of South Park, which encompasses a rich history. Among many who left their mark are the American Indians, Spaniards, trappers, government surveyors, prospectors, miners, ranchers, railroaders, oil and gas explorers, and more recently, cavers and paleontologists. This chapter introduces South Park and some highlights of its history, people, activities, and stories—including the discovery, exploration, and unearthing of the Pleistocene fossils of Porcupine Cave. It describes the discovery and early exploration of the Porcupine Cave, as well as the history of the ownership of the Porcupine Cave property.

Chapter Six defends one of the most offensive shows in television history—South Park—against its many critics. It argues that the vulgarity, obscenity, and blasphemy of the show have deep roots in a tradition of philosophical comedy that stretches back to such figures as Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Mark Twain. Comedy is by nature transgressive, and South Park derives its bite and its energy from the way it violates contemporary norms of political correctness. The chapter focuses on episodes of South Park that defend large corporations against the charge that they compete unfairly. Instead, the show suggests that small businesses enlist government on their side to ban outside competition and thereby to restrict consumer choice artificially. The chapter analyzes South Park as consciously libertarian in its viewpoint; the show rejects both liberals and conservatives insofar as they seek to restrict freedom.

This chapter considers China’s use of film to build its soft power in the West. In recent years, the Chinese film market has grown (and seemingly continues to grow) at an exponential rate, and this remarkable turn of events has enabled China to co-opt Hollywood as an adjunct soft power asset. Keen to deepen its penetration of China’s now highly lucrative market, the Hollywood majors are adopting a more ecumenical understanding of geopolitical space and proffering affirmative images of China’s role in world affairs. This chapter considers the depth and scope of this understanding and its articulation on screen. It argues that the positively framed understanding of China and its place in the world faces mounting competition from other Western sources of China information, few of which seem to share Hollywood’s affirmative stance.

This chapter examines irony as a mode of critique by comparing a South Park episode that aired on the eve of the war in Iraq to Stephen Colbert’s appearance as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner keynote in 2006. It reformulates the theories of unstable and stable irony first outlined by Wayne Booth in his 1974 book A Rhetoric of Irony and highlights irony’s potential to transform politics when it makes its ideological commitments apparent. It also suggests that directed gestures of stable irony challenge the power structures that have arisen in the wake of 9/11. It comments on Stanley Fish’s critique of Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony, the ways in which ironic performances conjure (or neglect to conjure) counternarratives, gradations of irony and their relationship to social criticism, and the irony of political engagement in a post-9/11 world.

This chapter examines the issue of censorship in relation to religious tolerance and religious extremism. Focusing on the controversy surrounding Comedy Central's television program South Park, it considers how private entities should deal with religious extremists. It discusses Episodes 200 and 201 of South Park, both of which depicted the Prophet Muhammad, and the veiled death threat issued by Revolution Muslim, a New York-based group of Muslim extremists, against the show's producers, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. It analyzes Comedy Central's decision to censor South Park Episode 201 despite being known for lampooning religions and religious people, including Christians, Catholics, Mormons, Scientologists, and even atheists, celebrities, and politicians.

This chapter examines the use of humor by both skeptics and supporters of the official 9/11 narrative, the 2004 9/11 Commission Report. It looks at how the 9/11 skeptic movements employed humor to question the state-sponsored act of terrorism and cover-up, whereas their opponents relied on ridicule to discredit the skeptics and depict them as misguided conspiracy theorists. After considering the claim of those who support the official 9/11 narrative that any expressions of skepticism is “conspiracy theory,” the chapter discusses three examples of humor, including an episode of South Park, that address 9/11 skepticism in order to highlight apparent paradoxes and ambiguities in the official 9/11 narrative. It points out how humor failed to bridge the enormous divide between the two camps.