For a second time, The Simpsons season 33 borrowed from one of South Park season 25’s episodes. The Simpsons and South Park have never been shy about their shared creative DNA. Two anarchic animated adult sitcoms, both shows were huge hits in the 90s and have been going strong ever since.
After South Park famously claimed that “Simpsons already did it" about pretty much every storyline under the sun, it came as no surprise when The Simpsons season 33 borrowed a South Park gag about gentrification. However, what is surprising is the fact that The Simpsons copied another joke from South Park season 25 again only a few episodes later. This time, The Simpsons took South Park’s depiction of teenagers as irrational, combative lunatics and made Lisa, Homer, and Superintendent Chalmers the unfortunate victims of this gag.
Both South Park season 25 and The Simpsons season 33 featured their young heroes (Cartman, Kenny, Kyle, Stan, and Lisa, respectively) dealing with teenagers who the shows both depicted as irascible, impossible to please, and infuriatingly inconsistent. In Lisa’s case, this was because of a new friendship with Superintendent Chalmers’ daughter Shauna. In South Park’s “Help My Teenager Hates Me!” (season 25, episode 5), the gang's fraught relationship with a quartet of ill-behaved teenagers was the result of an awkward alliance forged when the teens were the only people willing to play AirSoft with them. South Park’s horror-spoofing episode treated the teens like monsters whereas The Simpsons was a little kinder toward Shauna but, while the specifics of each episode differed, the teenager’s portrayals were still remarkably similar.
South Park’s four teenage characters and Shauna were unsure what they wanted but aggressive about demanding it, and both were constantly belligerent to anyone who showed them a modicum of kindness or understanding. This promoted endless understandable frustration for both the South Park boys, who just wanted someone to play AirSoft with, and Lisa Simpson, who simply wanted a fellow musician to jam with. Instead, in both shows, the child characters got more than they bargained for and ironically ended up being the ones to take care of the older teenagers rather than vice versa. However, Lisa’s story ended, like season 33’s Bleeding Gums Murphy plot, with her getting her wish and being able to play jazz with a more mellow Shauna.
In contrast, South Park took its more surreal story to its logical conclusion, with the AirSoft arena becoming a full-blown battlefield and Randy Marsh wiping out the teens via an AirSoft grenade. Where Lisa got a sweet ending and the opportunity to indulge in her pastime, in contrast, the boys of South Park ended up being put off AirSoft for good as their fathers contemplated shooting them before they, too, age into being “monsters.” Despite these differences, though, there’s still no denying the striking similarity between The Simpsons and South Park's takes on teenagers in 2022.