South Park: Cock Magic Review

“Yeah, we like hardcore stuff. We’re fucking dudes, bro!”

South Park has always been adept at combining fringe plotlines with the absurd to create some truly silly episodes. This is one of those episodes, and while certainly not the best mash-up of these sort of sensibilities, it’s still a lot of fun.

This all starts off with the girls’ volleyball team, and female athletics in general seeking more support (which is a very pleasant runner through the episode that doesn’t really get a proper wrap up), but people are always “too busy” to watch. In the case of the boys, they’re too busy watching Kenny fighting “Slaughterhouse” in Magic: the Gathering.

The boys are off in the mindset that conquering in Magic: the Gathering is pretty much the manliest thing you can do, which isn’t given much context other than the fact that these are young boys. When their needs still aren’t sated, they’re sent on a quest to do “hardcore dude shit” which ends up leading them to the basement of City Wok to watch some true, manly carnage: watching a bunch of roosters play Magic: the Gathering.

There’s also actually a much larger issue at hand here with cock magic, where roosters are being forced to play Magic against their will, in a sweeping epidemic that is ruining the town. The boys don’t know what they’re getting into.

Kenny begins to have qualms as to whether the roosters want to be playing Magic or not, and after feeling quite guilty about the whole thing, they go about adopting their own rooster, McNuggets, and putting him through the circuit. Soon McNuggets begins to raise the cock magic ranks, facing even the infamous Gadnok!

It’s kind of wonderful to hear Magic jargon and RPG lingo thrown about over shots of roosters staring intently at each other. It’s a lot of stupid fun, even if it this entire thing is all predicated off of a childish joke. It almost feels like this thing was designed out of a dare of doing something with “cock magic,” and this probably pulls as much as you can from the limited idea.

Meanwhile, Randy attempts to help the boys with cock magic, taking it in a very different direction, in what just feels like a very funny digression, but ends up being a welcome B-story that fills a good deal of screen time fortunately. The cock magic trend that’s spreading in town reignites the flames of Randy’s genital skill that got him kicked out of college. All of this material, particularly his performance at a child’s sixth birthday party, is exceptional stuff and one of the better Randy plots in awhile in my opinion.

This is pretty low stakes South Park where you’re just meant to laugh and enjoy the absurdity here rather than search for deeper meaning. It might not be the best episode of the season, but it’s a very solid piece of fluff installment in the meantime.

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!