‘South Park’: Trey Parker and Matt Stone Use 1 Rule to Write Stories
South Park is one of the funniest, raunchiest shows on television. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone don’t just make stuff up to be shocking, though. They do create episodes in one week’s time, but they still plot them carefully. The South Park creators shared their writing process with a class of NYU students in 2011.
Parker and Stone’s talk first aired on mtvU’s show Stand In, according to Vulture. A clip of the episode is still online on YouTube. In it, Parker and Stone explain the key to writing South Park episodes, and any television show or movie.
‘South Park’ starts by making sure every scene is funny
Parker began the class by showing how the South Park writers put all their scenes on a board. Before the episode is even finalized, every scene has to be funny.
“Our whole South Park writers room, one whole wall is one of these and we’ve got it split it up into three acts,” Parker said on Stand In via YouTube. “I walk around with the markers like this and we’ll go OK, this’ll be a funny scene if we had this. Each individual scene has to work as a funny sketch. You don’t want one scene that’s like what was the point of that scene.”
‘South Park’ is more than a collection of funny scenes
Here’s where the rule comes in. It’s not enough to have a collection of funny scenes. For a South Park episode to work, each scene has to lead into the next. They don’t always get it right, either.
“We found out this really simple rule that maybe you guys have all heard before, but it took us a long time to learn it,” Parker said. “We can take these beats, which are basically the beats of your outline, and if the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats, you’re f***ed. Basically. You’ve got something pretty boring.”
Instead of “and then,” the rule is each scene should follow the last with a “therefore” or a “but”.
“So what I’m saying is that you come up with an idea, and it’s like ‘so this happens’ right?” Parker said. “‘And then this happens,’ no no no no, It should be ‘this happens, and therefore this happens. But this happens, therefore this happens.’”
Trey Parker and Matt Stone still have to remind themselves of ‘therefore’ and ‘but’
By 2011, South Park was on Season 15. They’re now renewed through season 30 for more stories about “but” and “therefore”s.
“Literally we’ll sometimes write it out to make sure we’re doing it,” Parker said. “We’ll have our beats and we’ll say OK, this happened but then this happens and that affects this and that goes to that. That’s why you get a show that feels like this to that to this to that but this, here’s the complication, to that.”
Stone criticized other Hollywood productions for ignoring this storytelling rule.
“You see movies where you’re just watching, and it’s like this happens and then this happens, and this happens,” Stone said. “What the f*** am I watching this movie for? This happened, and then this happened, and then this happens. That’s not a movie, that’s not a story. Like Trey said, It’s ‘but’ ‘because’, ‘therefore’ that gives you the causation between each beat, and that’s a story.”
