When Eric Cartman declared, “Girls rule. Women are funny. Get over it,” was he really talking about Whitney Cummings?
Every South Park fan who spent the latter half of the 2010s complaining about Amy Schumer’s popularity on Reddit knows this bit intimately: Throughout South Park Season 20, Cartman was on a seemingly sarcastic campaign to prove to the rest of South Park that girls — including his girlfriend Heidi — can be funny. On multiple occasions, Cartman attempted to goad his female classmates into proving his point by making jokes centered around the phrases “my vagina” and the aforementioned affirmation, which Trey Parker, Matt Stone and the South Park writers copied word-for-word from the title of the New York Times’ review of the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot.
At the time, South Park viewers understood the running gag to be a side-eyed dig at Schumer, whose massively successful stand-up specials were filled with woman-focused blue humor, although the irony rarely occurred to viewers that the same male South Park fans who constantly trashed Schumer’s comedy style would probably explode into a fit of laughter and fake vomiting if anyone ever uttered the words “Scrotie McBoogerballs” in their presence.
However, in Cartman’s first and most famous speech on the subject of funny women in the Season 20 premiere “Member Berries,” he doesn’t actually name any specific comic when he asks that the girls of South Park Elementary make jokes about “my vagina.” So, is it possible that 2 Broke Girls creator and OnlyFans stand-up star Whitney Cummings thought that Cartman’s assembly speech was about her when she told the Fly on the Wall podcast that South Park targeted her for parody?
During the interview with Dana Carvey and David Spade, Cummings discussed her experiences of being mocked by other comedians while she was show-running the oft-criticized sitcom 2 Broke Girls between 2011 and 2017. “That’s not how I wanted to be on SNL, you know, like Tina Fey making fun of me,” she said of the many parodies of her and her comedy. “Or that’s not how I wanted to be on South Park. Like, they made fun of me on South Park.”
However, a quick CTRL+F through the entire database of South Park scripts doesn’t list a single mention of Cummings or 2 Broke Girls in any South Park episode ever. Though Cummings very well could have been confusing South Park with some other adult animated show such as Family Guy, which explicitly parodied her six-season CBS sitcom, when she lamented her mockery on Fly on the Wall, it would be a mistake that she’s made before.
Just last month, South Park fans in the show’s subreddit tried to get to the bottom Cummings’ comment on a 2022 episode of the Bertcast podcast, wherein she makes the same claim that South Park went after her while 2 Broke Girls was still on the air. Those confused South Park fans also couldn’t find a single solitary mention of Cummings or her sitcoms in the many thousands of South Park celebrity takedowns.
That brings us to “Member Berries,” which aired in 2016, when 2 Broke Girls was gearing up for its sixth and ultimately final season. Cummings’ stand-up style is certainly similar to Schumer’s sense of humor during the latter’s Leather Special era, and Cummings continues to embrace the entendre of her last name and the orgasmic glory of gross-out sexual humor to this day, as demonstrated by her OnlyFans partnership.
So, did Cummings watch Cartman sarcastically praise women who joke about their genitals and center their stand-up sets around sex and assume that South Park was talking about her?
Cummings may very well have fallen into a trap that has ensnared many South Park viewers over the years, so the old rule bears repeating — if you see yourself represented in Cartman’s latest bullshit, remember that he isn’t supposed to be “literally me.”