Thinking About South Park's Funniest Episode Still Makes Me Laugh Out Loud 21 Years Later

Published Aug 29, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. While South Park’s creators weren’t entirely satisfied with season 9, episode 9, I still can’t stop laughing whenever I revisit the inspired outing of the long-running animated comedy. The ending of South Park season 28 proves that the show’s unprecedented production schedule is still working as well as ever, despite some hiccups in recent years. For decades, as chronicled in the 2011 documentary Five Days to Air, South Park’s co-creators and lead actors Trey Parker and Matt Stone have written the show’s episodes in the week between their release dates. With only five days to come up with a plot, flesh it out, storyboard, animate, produce, and finish it, it should come as no surprise that South Park’s production team has sometimes struggled with this workload. However, if South Park’s banned episodes prove anything, it is that the satirical series benefits from its atypical release schedule. South Park can comment on news events as they unfold, where most animated comedies need at least eight months to produce a single episode. Of course, not every episode of South Park is based on timely, topical events, and some of the show’s finest half hours are character-centric comedy stories. In fact, one of the best South Park episodes ever, season 9, episode 9, “Marjorine,” is a rare outing that could have come from any season, and also an episode that the show’s own creators felt never came together. While their comments about its overstuffed story are admittedly apt, this doesn’t stop “Marjorine” from being an all-time great piece of screen comedy. Why South Park's "Marjorine" Episode Just Works Like so many great sitcom storylines, the story of “Marjorine” starts with a harmless misunderstanding that soon balloons out of all proportion and plunges the cast into chaos. Here, the boys of the town’s elementary school, inevitably led by South Park’s nefarious Cartman, become convinced that a crude paper fortune-teller made by the girls in their class is a sci-fi gadget that can somehow tell the future. Rather than leave the girls to their fun, the boys devise an absurdly complex plot to steal the fortune-teller, beginning by faking the death of their classmate Butters. As Butters’ parents grieve their loss, the boys reinvent him as the new girl in class, “Marjorine,” and task him with infiltrating a sleepover the girls are hosting and obtaining the device. From Butters getting a makeover from the girls after they accidentally reduce “Marjorine” to tears, to Butters’ parents getting a visit from a character straight out of a Stephen King novel who warns them against digging up their son’s body and burying it in a Native American burial ground, the ensuing story only gets more ridiculous with each subsequent scene. Butters becoming more concerned with being one of the girls that getting the device raises a smile, but the boys eventually deciding the device is too powerful for their own use is truly inspired. "Marjorine" Is South Park's Strongest Elements Coming Together Meanwhile, the subplot of Butters’ father exhuming his body (actually a badly disguised pig carcass) and burying it in the burial ground, something he would never have done if it weren’t for the mysterious old man’s warnings, makes the silliness all the more absurd. In a DVD commentary, Parker and Stone said re-watching “Marjorine” was tough since the episode crammed too many ideas into too short a runtime. On the contrary, “Marjorine” might be the perfect encapsulation of the show’s appeal. Like South Park’s earlier Stephen King spoof, also among the show’s best episodes, the outing is undeniably chaotic and crams in more story than any twenty-minute episode could reasonably be expected to cover. However, it’s in this very chaos that South Park’s genius shines, as “Marjorine” feels less like a tightly planned, polished professional plot and more like writers making up a dumb, hilarious story for their own amusement. Release Date August 13, 1997 Network Comedy Central Showrunner Trey Parker Cast Trey Parker Eric Cartman / Stan Marsh (voice) Matt Stone Kyle Broflovski / Kenny McCormick (voice) Directors Adrien Beard Writers David A. Goodman, Nancy M. Pimental, Kenny Hotz, Philip Stark, Dave Weasel, Dan Sterling, Susan Hurwitz Arneson, Trisha Nixon, David R. Goodman, Tim Talbott, Pam Brady, Robert Lopez, Dani Michaeli, Kyle McCulloch, Karey Dornetto, Jonathan Kimmel, Jane Bussmann Franchise(s) South Park Creator(s) Matt Stone, Trey Parker