The Time South Park Accidentally Stole A Joke For The Dumbest Reason

By Robert Scucci
| Published 5 minutes ago

One of the side effects of producing an entire episode of animated television in less than six days is that there’s not a lot of time for crucial quality checks. For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, though, maintaining that kind of Saturday Night Live energy allows South Park to stay on top of current events, for better or worse. It lets them sneak clever double entendres past the censors and pretty much make fun of whatever they want because they have the resources to turn whatever’s in the news into an episode, or in the case of Season 14’s “Insheeption,” knock out a parody while it’s still part of the pop culture conversation.

While being able to work so quickly certainly has its advantages (until election night), there are also blind spots, which is exactly what happened with “Insheeption.” Long story short (“I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining” reference … nice!), Trey Parker was accused of plagiarizing Dan Gurewitch and David Young of CollegeHumor, forcing the creative duo to call the guys themselves and issue an apology. The accusation spread quickly online because the similarities between the CollegeHumor sketch and the finished episode were difficult to ignore.

Unlike most comedians who get caught stealing jokes red-handed (looking at you, Denis Leary), Parker and Stone admitted to the impropriety and later credited Gurewitch and Young, who wrote the “Inception Characters Don’t Understand Inception” skit that inspired the now-infamous episode of South Park.

Trey Parker Hadn’t Seen The Movie He Was Making Fun Of

Like most South Park episodes, production starts on Thursday night, and the finished episode needs to be turned in to Comedy Central by Wednesday morning to make it to air on time. According to the mini-commentaries that Parker and Stone reluctantly recorded for every DVD release, it hadn’t occurred to them to parody Inception, a movie Trey Parker hadn’t yet seen, until their episode about Stan Marsh’s hoarding problem was already well underway.

As soon as the plot developed to the point where it’s revealed Mr. Mackey also had a hoarding problem, and hypnosis was the only way to help him and Stan overcome their condition, everyone on the writing staff thought the episode now known as “Insheeption” would make for the perfect Inception parody. There was just one problem: Trey Parker hadn’t seen the movie.

While Inception had a 25-week theatrical run, which is pretty much unthinkable these days, Parker and Stone couldn’t make it to a showing because of their grueling production schedule. They also couldn’t find any DVD screeners or anything else that would lead them directly to the source material quickly, so Stone, having seen the movie earlier in the run, started looking for parodies online, eventually landing on CollegeHumor’s “Inception Characters Don’t Understand Inception” skit.

In the CollegeHumor skit, several lines appear to have been lifted verbatim by Parker while he was working on the South Park episode, including how insane the dream-level logic is, how empty and scary the dream spaces are, and how every Inception agent was super stoked about how complex and cool it all was. In both the CollegeHumor skit and the South Park episode that followed, the characters meant to represent Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb say, word for word, “Sometimes my thoughts of my dead wife manifest themselves as trains.” If you look at the writing on the wall, it’s obvious that South Park plagiarized CollegeHumor, but here’s the funny part: they absolutely didn’t mean to.

Captain Hindsight Has The Answer

While scrambling to parody a movie he hadn’t seen, using only parody content as source material because he couldn’t get a clean copy of Inception, Parker took Stone literally when they sat down to watch the CollegeHumor skit. The joke Stone was chasing and trying to convey to Parker involved how egregiously complex the dialogue was whenever the film explained its dream logic. When Parker and Stone saw the skit, the latter mistakenly assumed they were quoting the movie directly and presenting those lines out of context to highlight how ridiculous the dialogue actually was when delivered in a rapid-fire fashion.

In a conversation with The New York Times that surfaced after Parker and Stone faced backlash for ripping off CollegeHumor, Stone was forthcoming about what actually happened behind the scenes at South Park, stating, “It was like, Let’s parody the gobbledygook, because honestly, that movie, all those explanations, and explanations of explanations… We thought their joke was that a lot of those lines were actually in the movie, and they were banging them against each other, and showing that the ‘Inception’ characters didn’t even know ‘Inception.’ That was a mistake, and it was an honest mistake.”

The conversation was capped off with Stone saying, “It’s just because we do the show in six days, and we’re stupid and we just threw it together. But in the end, there are some lines that we had to call and apologize for.” In other words, thanks to Captain Hindsight, the South Park creators never tried to deny the allegations that they ripped off CollegeHumor, but they did everything they could to make it right after the fact.