Parker and Stone met as film majors at the University of Colorado at Boulder, creating short films with a crude comedic sensibility. One of their shorts, "Jesus vs. Frosty," used rudimentary construction paper cutout animation techniques to introduce a quartet of eight-year-olds who profanely narrated a battle between holiday icons. Their films caught the eye of a FOX executive, Brian Graden, who paid the pair $2,000 to create a video Christmas card with a similar sensibility. "The Spirit of Xmas," which featured a boorish battle for holiday supremacy between Jesus and Santa, eventually arbitrated by skater Brian Boitano, became a Hollywood sensation in 1995, circulating widely among producers and stars and eventually becoming one of the first videos to gain wide distribution on the Internet. Comedy Central capitalized on the underground popularity, contracting Stone and Parker to create an animated series based on the kids featured in both short films.

     South Park debuted on Comedy Central in the summer of 1997 to much notoriety, cultural disdain, and instant popularity among the channel's young male audience. The series focused on the lives of nervous everybody Stan, skeptical Jew Kyle, episodically killed Kenny, and the overweight, rude comedic centerpiece Cartman, with an ever-expanding host of supporting characters constituting the community of South Park, Colorado. While following the basic structure of a family sitcom, complete with episode-ending moral messages about what was learned each week, the show offered topical explorations into current events and social issues. Parker and Stone used computer techniques to imitate their construction paper aesthetic, embracing the flexibility of the technology to alter their animated sequences hours before airing programs, referring to their process as "virtually live animation." Viewers quickly made South Park Comedy Central's flagship program and the top-rated cable program of the late 1990s, recognizing that between the lowbrow references to "talking poo" and Chef's "salty chocolate halls" resided some of the most clever and sophisticated satire of its era.

     Certainly South Park could have never come to air without the dual  predecessors  of  The  Simpsons and Bevis and Butt-Head. Like  these  two  forebears, South Park's arrival provoked fears concerning its potential influences on children. Even  though  Comedy Central scheduled the show after 10:00  P.M.  and  prefaced every episode with a disclaimer stating. 'The Following Program Contains Coarse   Language, and Due to Its Content It Should Not Be Viewed  by  Anyone," the  assumption  that  all  animation  must  be  for  kids led to condemnation from a host of critics. Additionally, the profane dialogue and cynicism coming out of the mouths of elementary schoolers struck many  as the nadir of televisual bad taste. This critique was intensified by the successful merchandising of the characters. with T-shirts and toys that many felt were catering to children. Comedy Central realized that the negative publicity was drawing audiences to its taboo­ hosting program, especially among its core niche of young men, and thus supported and  even  highlighted the profane content and satire to maintain viewership.

     Parker and Stone responded to anti-South Park critiques within the program itself, creating their  own taboo media sensation. The Terrance and Phillip Show. The boys' favorite television program  is  a  never­-ending succession of poorly animated fart jokes, paralleling some critics' perspective on South Park itself. Adults within South Park condemn Terrance and Phillip, protesting the show's negative effects and profane sensibility to the fictitious Cartoon Channel. They extended this reflexivity to the feature film hit  South Park : Bigger, Longer and Uncut in 1999 : the highly profane film focused on the corrupting influence of Terrance and Phillip"s feature film, inspiring extreme vulgarity in the impressionable minds of South Park's youth, and resulting in a backlash that leads to U.S. war with Canada and an attempted Armageddon led by Satan and his gay lover, Saddam Hussein. While certainly outrageous in every taboo-busting possibility, the film was hailed by many as one of the finest musicals and social satires in years.

     South Park has declined in notoriety and ratings but remains a consistent presence, having reached 100 episodes in 2003 and rolled out deluxe DVD editions of early seasons. The show has cemented Comedy Central's brand identity as the destination spot for a mixture of crude and sophisticated humor aimed at young men, carried forward in varying degrees of success by programs such as The Man Show, Crank Yankers, Insomniac with Dave Attell, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. South Park's role as the contemporary standard bearer for over-the-top social satire on television was reinforced in 2003, when television pioneer Norman Lear joined the program as a creative consultant, endorsing Parker and Stone's brand of humor as the direct descendant of Lear's groundbreaking 1970s comedy.