Butters Stotch is extremely oblivious to most of the things that happen to him. For someone who’s not part of the core group of friends that South Park follows around, he sure does receive a lot of screen time.
This is because Butters has one of the more humorous story lines-- his dad is always grounding him, he was fired as Kenny’s replacement, and he was even bullied by his grandmother. Out of everything though, Butters is most loved for all the trouble Cartman causes him.
While a lot of the Butters’ problems stem from Cartman’s manipulative ideas, it’s not the only reason why Butters is always getting the worse end of the stick.
In the first few seasons, Butters is nothing like his current self. The change happened when Kenny died in season 5 and didn’t come back until the last scene of season 6. Writers used Butters more once there were only three friends to focus on. Even though Kenny came back, Butters has had a very dominant and beloved role as the dopey, clueless, uninformed friend on South Park.
It’s not as though Butters never knows what’s happening to him, rather he almost rarely realizes when he’s being duped. It also doesn’t help that he’s a bit overdramatic and that his parents treat him horribly. For someone who is so beaten down all the time though, Butters does have his moments of resilience.
Here are the 15 Times Butters Didn’t Know What Was Going On.
15. Cartman Convinces Butters That An Asteroid Destroyed Earth
In season 7's “Casa Bonita”, Kyle is having his birthday at the Mexican restaurant Casa Bonita, which is known for its cliff divers, puppet shows, and live music. Eric Cartman wants nothing more than to be invited to Kyle’s birthday but, unfortunately, Kyle decides to invite Butters instead of him.
Cartman will do anything to be invited to Casa Bonita, so he ends up convincing Butters that Earth is about to be hit by a major asteroid. Butters believes Cartman and allows Cartman to hide him in a bunker. After some time in the bunker, Cartman transitions Butters to the old gas station and locks him inside of a fridge. Thinking the fridge is trash, a garbage truck takes the it to a dump yard.
Butters assumes that the dump yard is the town after the asteroid has hit Earth. Thinking his friends and family had all died, Butters decides that he needs to start rebuilding. A garbage woman later finds Butters, who has spent his time recreating the town of South Park out of trash.
14. Butters Thinks Cartman Is A Ghost
In the season 9 episode "The Death of Eric Cartman", Cartman is at Stan's house along with Stan, Kyle, and Kenny. When Stan's mom comes home, she tells the boys they have to help her unload the groceries from the car before they can eat the Kentucky Fried Chicken that she brought home.
The boys agree to help. However, Cartman uses this time to eat all the breading off of every fried chicken piece. This causes Kenny to cry.
Stan, Kyle, and Kenny convince the other boys at school to ignore Cartman. Instead of thinking they're all ignoring him, Cartman believes he's dead. For some reason, Butters isn't at school that day and says hello to Cartman as Cartman is walking down the street.
Cartman tells Butters that he's died and that Butters is the only one who can see him. After freaking out, Butters believes that Cartman is a ghost. Butters' parents think Butters is seeing things, so they take him to a hospital and do horrifying tests on him.
13. Butters Assumes He Has a Girlfriend
Raisins is a South Park hotspot that the boys first discover in the season 7 episode of the same name. Stan is inconsolable after Wendy breaks up with him, so all of his friends get together and take him to a local restaurant.
The restaurant is similar to Hooters, but for young kids. All of the girls who work there are named after car brands and wear inappropriately tight shirts and a lot of makeup.
Butters falls in love with one of the Raisins waitresses named Lexis. He gives her money and gifts, but she refuses to go anywhere with Butters. She tells Butters to just keep visiting her at the restaurant. Butters thinks Lexis is his girlfriend and even tells his parents this.
Butters doesn’t realize that Lexis is only using him for his money. Once he finds out, he ends up crying alone in the street until he is found by Stan. Butters tells Stan that his sadness is a "beautiful sadness," because it proves how much he was able to care about something.
12. Butters Thinks He's Been Turned Into a Vampire
The season 12 episode “The Ungroundable” premiered while Twilight was the major craze. In it, South Park becomes infested with kids dressing up as vampires. Leave it to Butters to assume the vampire obsessed kids are actual vampires. Not only that, but when the kids take him to Hot Topic and transform him, Butters believes he has become one of them.
The vampire kids drink Clamato juice regularly and pretend that it’s human blood. After Butters sees them do this, he goes to Cartman’s bedroom while Cartman is sleeping and tries to suck out Cartman’s blood, but ends up only giving him a hickey.
While Butters thinks he’s a vampire, his parents try to ground him. Butters is beyond grounding, though, as he believes that he’s untouchable as a vampire. He acts up, dyes his hair, and then essentially starves himself because he can’t drink human blood.
11. Butters Believes He Has A New Robot Friend
In the season 8 episode “AWESOM-O”, Butters opens his front door to find a very large package waiting for him. Surprised, Butters questions if the package is his birthday present, but then remembers his birthday isn’t until September 11th. Butters then opens the package and discovers a fake robot named AWESOM-O made out of cardboard. Of course, Butters believes that the robot is real.
The robot is actually Cartman, who is trying to trick Butters. The joke wasn’t supposed to last for very long, but Butters tells his robot that he has video of Cartman pretending to be Britney Spears while dancing with a Justin Timberlake cutout, and Cartman wants to steal back the video.
The two boys leave South Park to visit Butters' family in California. There, AWESOM-O is kidnapped by the government.
10. Butters' Parents Hire An Actor to Be His Future Self
“My Future Self ‘n’ Me” is a season 6 episode that focuses on Stan and his future self, which appears at his front door during a lightning storm. It turns out that Stan’s future is quite dim to say the least. He’s a druggie, a convicted felon, and he's homeless. Not wanting his future to end up that way, Stan takes matters into his own hands.
One of the ways Stan tries to get his life together is by having Butters help him with his homework. While Butters is talking to Stan, he reveals that he too has a future self at home. Butters’ future self had been living with him for months.
Neither Butters nor Stan realized that their parents had hired actors to pretend to be them from the future in order to get them on the straight and narrow.
9. Butters Believes That The Government Is God
In the episode “Let Go, Let Gov” from season 17, Cartman tells the other kids that the NSA is watching everyone all the time. This leads to Butters to believe that the government is essentially a god. He begins praying to the government before bed and asks the government to take care of everyone he loves.
Butters ends up going to the DMV to confess his sins. He’s also visited by two Jehovah’s Witnesses and convinces them to start believing in the government rather than their religion.
Butters then starts going door to door spreading the word of the government. By the end of the episode, Butters still believes in the government as though it’s a god and convinces Cartman to join his religious group at the DMV.
8. Butters Didn't Know About Anthrax Attacks
“Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants” is a season 5 episode of South Park that deals with the town and their fear of terrorists. Whether it be showing off American pride, watching the news from sun up to sun down, or donating money to Afghanistan, the city of South Park reacted strongly after the September 11th attacks.
The first scene shows Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny waiting at the bus stop as usual, except this time they’re wearing gas masks. Butters shows up not wearing a mask and asks why the other boys are wearing gas masks. They respond by telling Butters that they are wearing gas masks to protect themselves from a potential anthrax attack.
Butters panics and asks the boys what he should do since no one told him that he had to wear a gas mask. They tell him to hold his breath since he doesn’t have a mask, which Butters does until he passes out. No one informed Butters that he needed to protect himself.
7. Butters Accidentally Becomes A Pimp
When the other boys at school find out that Butters’ hasn’t ever kissed a girl in the season 13 episode entitled “Butters’ Bottom Bitch”, they tie him to the tetherball poll. They then find out that another girl at school will kiss anyone if you pay her five dollars and Butters’ pays for his kiss before coming up with an idea.
Butters helps promote the little girl in order to help her find clients. Butters then takes a cut of the earnings in return. This evolves into Butters’ finding more girls to be part of his so called “kissing company.” He goes to a pimp convention and then finds grown women to be part of his company.
Not realizing what the women are actually doing, Butters tells a bank clerk that a government official is one of the women’s clients and that the government official likes receiving kisses in a motel room.
Butters eventually quits being a pimp when he realizes true love matters more than kisses, though he never truly realizes what was actually going on.
6. The Boys Convince Butters That He Wrote A Disgusting Book
In the season 14 episode “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs”, South Park's fourth-grade class is assigned to read the book The Catcher in the Rye. While most of the kids are underwhelmed by it, Butters becomes deranged.
The book was banned in schools in real life and it’s known as the book Mark David Chapman claims inspired him to kill John Lennon. After Butters’ reads the book, he decides that he needs to kill John Lennon, but is disappointed to learn that someone already has.
Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny are all mad during this time because they were promised a much darker book. They don’t understand how a book like this could get banned, so they choose to write their own book called “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs" that is so horrible, it causes people to throw up while reading it.
Stan’s mom finds the book and the boys blame it on Butters. They convince Butters that he wrote it because he had been having blackouts ever since reading The Catcher in the Rye. Butters then goes on to become an acclaimed writer, but the book causes the death of the Kardashian sisters, who Butters loves.
5. Butters Confuses A Porno For Lord Of The Rings
Butters becomes Gollum in the season 6 episode “The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers”. The town of South Park becomes obsessed with The Lord of the Rings and Stan, Kyle, and Cartman all follow suit. While roleplaying the characters, Randy sends the boys on a quest to deliver their rented video of The Lord of the Rings to the Stotch household.
The boys succeed in their mission, and Butters’ parents give their son the video to watch, thinking that it’s the Lord of the Rings. However, it’s actually a porno that Randy had also rented. Butters loves it and thinks that it’s the real Lord of the Rings movies.
When Randy sends the boys back after realizing his mistake, Butters doesn’t want to give the video up. He begins to act like Gollum, doing everything he can to get the movie back.
4. Butters Keeps Getting Told That He's "Bicurious"
In the season 11 episode “Cartman Sucks”, Cartman invites Butters over for a sleepover. When Butters falls asleep, Cartman takes a picture with Butters' private parts in his mouth. Kyle tells Cartman that it’s not funny and that it makes Cartman gay.
Kyle then tricks Cartman by saying that Cartman should stick his parts into Butters’ mouth in order to cancel it out. Cartman believes Kyle, which leads to Butters’ dad finding Cartman and Butters in a weird moment.
Butters has no idea about what's going on since he has a blindfold on. Yet, his dad tells Butters that Butters is “bi-curious” and needs to leave South Park and go to a conversion camp.
Throughout the whole episode, Butters is confused, which leads to more people believing he is “bi-curious” since he keeps saying he’s confused. Butters has no idea that the camp is a conversion camp, let alone why he’s there. In the end, he puts everyone in their place and tells them all he wasn’t confused until he arrived at the camp.
3. Butters Sells His "Special Goo"
When Randy finds out that the boys aren’t allowed to do “dangerous” plays during football in the season 16 episode “Sarcastaball”, he takes matters into his own hands. Randy goes to a South Park Elementary PTA meeting and sarcastically reinvents the game of football.
Calling it sarcastaball, football now involves the boys playing with a balloon, wearing bras and paper hats, and giving each other hugs instead of tackling other players.
Butters is fantastic at sarcastaball. He ends up helping Cartman, who is too mean to be good at the game. Butters shows Cartman his stash of what he calls his “special goo,” which in reality is just his semen. Cartman tells Butters that the special goo helps him perform better.
Butters ends up selling his special goo as a sports drink which no one realizes is semen until Randy points it out. Butters has no idea as to what semen even is, let alone why it is a bad thing to sell. Butters’ dad never told Butters about any of this, so Butters never realizes that selling it and giving it to others is bad.
2. Butters Is Diagnosed With Multiple Personality Disorder
In the season 15 episode “City Sushi”, Butters is diagnosed with multiple personality disorder when he’s found playing make believe.
Butters hands out fliers for a new Japanese restaurant which causes the owner of City Wok and the new Japanese restaurant owner to start fighting. Butters gets into trouble for causing “an Asian turf war” before being taken to a therapist by his parents.
Butters finds out that his therapist is acting weird after Butters is diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. Butters records himself while sleeping and sees that his therapist came into his room.
When Butters confronts the therapist, he learns that the therapist is the one with multiple personality disorder. Things only get more chaotic from there when the therapist confuses Butters every time he reverts back to his therapist persona.
However, it turns out that the therapist is actually the City Wok owner the whole time.
1. Butters' Mom Tries To Kill Him
The season 5 episode "Butters' Very Own Episode" premiered after the episode that Kenny officially dies in. The episode follows Butters as he prepares to go to Bennigan's with his parents for their wedding anniversary.
Butters' mom asks him to spy on his dad to see what his dad is buying her for their anniversary. As it turns out, his dad goes to see a movie called Fisting Firemen 9, and afterwards goes a gay bathhouse. Butters has no idea what this means and happily tells his mom about it.
Butters' mom ends up going crazy. She attempts to kill Butters by telling him to stay in the car as she pushes it into the river. She then goes home to kill herself before Butters' dad walks in and stops her.
Meanwhile, Butters is floating down the river until the car stops. He makes his way back to South Park, without realizing what really happened.
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What are your favorite Butters moments in South Park? Let us know in the comments!