How South Park Was Born: An Oral History of 'The Spirit of Christmas' | Longform

Comedy Central decided to move forward with a series, despite the focus group scores.

Graden: That takes more bravery than people know until they’ve had those jobs.

Herzog: Anybody that tells you they knew it was going to be a hit—and the only people I would believe if they said that would be Matt and Trey—that’s just bullshit. Nobody knows, right? What we did know was it was really funny. We thought it was clever. And for a network that was still struggling to reach 50 million homes, we went, “At the very least this will get attention.” But then I bolted up in bed just nights before we put it on the air, in cold sweat, I swear to God. I was like, “Wait, can I get arrested for this? Is this legal?” The big thing at the time on cable was was how HBO would show some breasts on Dream On. You have to remember how far the culture has come, and how far the needle has moved in a good part of 20 years. There was nothing on TV like this. I don’t think anybody understood how funny, how smart, how ingenious it was going to actually be.

In 1997, South Park debuted to nearly a million viewers—considered huge at the time for basic cable, especially for Comedy Central—and its ratings quickly grew. That climbing viewership seemed almost inexplicable.

Herzog: I came from MTV, and South Park took off quicker, faster, and with more impact than any sort of rock band or music act that I’d ever seen. It took off like a rocket. And it got an immediate, incredible critical response.

Graden: The only thing we could figure is that tons of college kids had gone to the library and had watched “The Spirit of Christmas” over and over [online]. Five weeks later, I remember walking in New York and seeing Matt and Trey on the cover of Newsweek—and trying to process how this happened.

Parker: The Internet was starting to become a thing that people were catching on to, and it was this marketing tool for the first time. “Spirit of Christmas,” because it’s so shitty looking in the first place, is something that worked really well on the Internet because you could download it quick and it can look like shit and it’s okay. That’s part of why it was able to be viral on VHS even though it would degrade—the whole part of the joke of it was how shitty it looked. We got so lucky. Still, to this day, every stranger that walks up to me usually says, “I have your original tape.” People come up to me all the time and they’re like, “You know, I had one of the original ‘Spirit of Christmas’ VHS’s.” And I always say, “Oh, wow, that’s cool.” And in my head I’m thinking, “Dude, do you know how many people tell me that?”

South Park characters: Comedy Central, Trey Parker: Ron Galella/WireImage; Brian Graden: Keith Bedford/Getty Images; Doug Herzog; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic;

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