In the first few seasons of South Park, Kenny was killed off in every episode. Stan and Kyle would cry out, “Oh my God, they killed Kenny! You b*stards!” And then, in the next episode, Kenny would be inexplicably resurrected. This running gag was put to bed in season 5, when Kenny was killed off “permanently” and was absent from almost all of season 6.
He still dies in the occasional episode, and his powers were explained in the superhero-themed episodes. Kenny had some really brutal death scenes over the years. So, we’ve ranked his 10 most gruesome deaths from the show’s early seasons.
AUTOEROTIC ASPHYXIATION
After being diagnosed as a sex addict by the CDC in “Sexual Healing,” Kenny hears about autoerotic asphyxiation. Naturally, he decides to give it a go, and he is later found dead. He’s wearing a Batman costume, hanging from his belt, and his pants are down.
This is one of Kenny’s few death scenes that are actually his own fault. It wasn’t a freak accident; it was a kinky sex thing he heard about that he wanted to try.
STRUCK BY LIGHTNING
It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever get hit by lightning, but if it was going to happen to someone, Kenny McCormick does seem like an unsurprising candidate. In the season 3 premiere, the choir kids of South Park Elementary were taken to a dying rainforest for a benefit gig and ended up having a horrible time.
Even the teacher, played by guest star Jennifer Aniston, despised the rainforest by the end of the trip. As the children got lost in the jungle, Kenny was struck by lightning and killed.
SHOT IN THE HEAD
In “The List,” Wendy uncovers a conspiracy among the girls of South Park Elementary. They listed the cutest boys in school, but only ranked Clyde the hottest in order to get free shoes from his parents, who own a shoe store. The episode comes down to a standoff on the roof of the school as Bebe pulls a gun to prevent Wendy from revealing the truth.
As they wrestle over the gun, it goes off, but neither of the girls is hit. Cut to Kenny’s family having dinner across town, and the bullet flies through the window and into Kenny’s head. At least it was a quick, painless, unexpected death.
STRANGLED BY A TETHERBALL ROPE
For most kids, tetherball is a fun way to spend recess. However, a tetherball pole is among the many things that have killed Kenny over the years. He got stuck at the top of the pole, then strangled to death by the rope.
This must’ve been a really nasty way to go. This death can be seen in the second episode of the show’s initial season, so it was one of the first times audiences got to see Kenny die.
COOKED IN A MICROWAVE
In a season 1 episode, Stan accidentally bumps Kenny into an industrial-sized microwave. Kenny is cooked in the microwave and turned into a bloody mush in a matter of seconds.
At the very least, the cut-out animation didn’t make the microwave death look as gruesome as Matthew Vaughn’s live-action rendition of a similar scene in 2010’s Kick-Ass.
DISMEMBERED BY FOOTBALL PLAYERS
When Kenny finds himself out on the football field, alone, surrounded by burly, well-trained players, things take a very violent turn. The players charge at Kenny and end up tearing him limb from limb in their pursuit of the ball.
It wasn’t enough to just tackle him for the ball; apparently, they felt the need to rip his head off, too.
LANDING IN A BOX OF OLD, RUSTY, SHARP NAILS
Next to a sign that reads, “Dump old, rusty, sharp nails here,” there’s a box filled with nails. And in one of Kenny’s most horrifying death scenes, he falls right in the box. He goes in head-first, so the nails go straight through his skull as he lands on the pile.
This has to be one of the worst ways to die. Landing on a pile of nails is bad enough, for obvious reasons, but to add insult to horrific injury, these were old, rusty, sharp nails.
IMPALED WITH A METAL PIPE ON A ROLLERCOASTER
In season 5’s “Cartmanland,” Cartman inherits $1 million from his grandma and uses it to buy his own theme park. He doesn’t want to let people in, but as maintenance costs continue to rise, he reluctantly lets in a few customers a day.
On one of the rollercoasters, Kenny is impaled with a low-hanging metal pipe. Just imagine the speed of a rollercoaster – then imagine a metal pipe going through your head at that speed. Poor Kenny. When his family sues Cartman, Cartman replies, “Kenny? He dies all the time!”
JUMPING INTO A PIT OF SPEARS
When the boys start dressing up as superheroes, none of them believe Kenny’s claim that he actually has the superpower of invincibility. Whenever he dies, he just wakes up in his bed and carries on living. Despite the fact that they’ve all seen him die and then come back to life, they just don’t buy it.
When they all get trapped in the City of R’Lyeh, Kenny decides to jump into a pit of spears, killing himself, so that he’ll wake up in his room. Right as he jumps on the spears, before actually dying, he comments on how much it “f*cking hurts.”
CHAINSAW TO THE BACK OF THE HEAD
Trust South Park’s first Halloween episode to provide fans with arguably Kenny’s most gruesome and horrifying death of all time: a chainsaw to the back of the head. In the episode in which a zombie plague spreads across South Park, Kenny is one of the first patients of the epidemic.
Later, when Kyle is desperately trying to survive the outbreak, he jams a chainsaw into the back of undead Kenny’s head. This scene is a joy to watch for fans of gore because Kenny’s brains splatter everywhere the second that chainsaw touches him.