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HUMANCENTiPAD "HUMANCENTiPAD" "Funnybot" "Royal Pudding" Royal Pudding
"Funnybot"
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Episode no. Season 15
Episode 2
Production no. 1502
Original airdate May 4, 2011
Episode chronology
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"HUMANCENTiPAD" "Royal Pudding"
List of all South Park episodes
This article is about the episode. For the eponymous character, see Funnybot.

"Funnybot" is the second episode of Season Fifteen, and the 211th overall episode of South Park. It originally aired on May 4, 2011.[1]

Synopsis[]

Jimmy hosts the Special Ed Department's First Annual Comedy Awards.[1]

Plot[]

SPW pic -- Spoiler Spoiler warning!
Plot details follow.

In the hallway at South Park Elementary, Jimmy Valmer hands out fliers looking for votes, announcing the Special Ed Department will be hosting its first annual comedy awards show. They advise him it is a bad idea, but he is convinced it will be a success.

At the ceremony, which bores most of the audience, Jimmy announces awards for himself and many others who did not show up to accept them, finally handing the award for Most Unfunny People, which goes to the Germans, and the Kathy Griffin Award, given to the celebrity most likely to show up and receive it; Tyler Perry is announced as the winner and immediately walks in to claim it. The only person to laugh at Perry is Tolkien, who is upset with himself after realizing that no one else in the audience found Perry funny.

When the news reaches the Germans the next day, they are irate, hosting a press conference disputing the attack. The children express concern about their reaction, and that Tyler Perry has remained at the school, but Jimmy continues to insist the awards were successful. The Germans then arrive at South Park Elementary and take the students and faculty hostage in the gymnasium. To show the students that Germans are funny, the Germans unveil a robot called Funnybot. The students actually find the robot comedian amusing, though Jimmy worries it will take the humanity our of comedy.

Funnybot takes the comedy world by storm, becoming ubiquitous in all kinds of media. This distresses a number of human comedians, such as Jay Leno and Adam Sandler, who fear for their livelihoods. The comedians then decide to storm South Park Elementary, demanding that the students stop Funnybot. The boys, with the addition of Jimmy, decide to take up the task, but it is complicated by Funnybot's increasingly sinister behavior. During a stand-up performance, Funnybot suddenly deploys two rotary cannons from his body and kills nearly all of the 1,100 people in the audience, before shouting his "Awkward!" catchphrase.

The boys manage to gain access to Funnybot, only to discover that he plans to destroy the world as the ultimate joke. Funnybot connects to the defense mainframes of both Russia and the United States, arming the nuclear missiles of both countries. Barack Obama announces the impending destruction on television, admitting he will watch a Tyler Perry movie with his family. The boys are unable to disconnect Funnybot due to a defensive field surrounding him. However, Kyle remembers that robots can be confused by a logical paradox. Jimmy gives Funnybot a comedy award and asks him how there can be a comedy awards show, because if one accepts an award for being funny, it means they are taking themselves and comedy seriously, which is not funny. This paradox confounds Funnybot, forcing him to disable his defenses so the boys can disconnect him.

Afterwards, the Germans, the boys, the comedians, and President Barack Obama overlook a massive hole. The boys push a wooden crate onto a platform where it is encased inside three massive metallic shells; the assembly is lowered into the hole, which is then filled with concrete. Funnybot appears among the crowd, stating that he now knows that comedy is meant to be performed by humans. A noise is heard from the concrete-filled hole, and it is revealed that Perry has been entombed. Jimmy promises never to do another comedy awards show again, but Cartman says that one may still occur anyway as sinister music plays.

Critical Reception[]

AV Club gave "Funnybot" a "C+" rating saying: "At its root, “Funnybot” was a satire about the artificiality and disposability of so much modern comedy: Armed with his programmed catchphrase (“AWKWARD!”), Funnybot quickly becomes the biggest draw in America, despite the fact that his scatological riffing is essentially a random matrix of 4chan-ready insults (“I wouldn’t let Adam Sandler suck my saggy tits for $1 million worth of Oprah’s tampons”) when it isn’t freeform Dadaist poetry (“Don’t you hate how Mexicans always complain about turtles in their vaginas?”). Based on this, there are probably some who will likely draw comparisons between Funnybot and Charlie Sheen—and certainly the scene where Funnybot decides it would be funny to mow down his entire audience with machine guns, with the audience only seeming to love him more for the abuse, is reminiscent of Sheen’s occasionally disastrous yet bafflingly successful live schadenfreude tour and also that time he shot Kelly Preston. And of course, when it comes time for the boys to put a stop to Funnybot’s growing comedy empire—which has put every comic from Louis C.K. to Dane Cook to Zach Galifianakis to Russell Brand out of business, apparently even taking 7 Up commercials away from poor David Spade—they go and visit Funnybot at his office in CBS, which is right next door to a One And A Half Men poster, wink wink."[2]


IGN gave "Funnybot" a "6.5" rating saying: "The focus of this week's story is comedy, or to be more specific: a comedy awards show, no doubt inspired by the one Comedy Central just had. It's ironic because the comedy awards are the most unfunny thing I've seen on South Park in a while - yes, even taking into account that Jimmy was meant to be bombing as a host. The first ten minutes of the episode are pretty bad by South Park standards, but there are a few spots that made me smile a little. Tyler Perry showing up to accept the Kathy Griffin award was amusing at least, and so was Token's inability to stop laughing at his jokes (and President Obama too, apparently). I was also mildly amused by Cartman's apparent ability to speak fluent German, though I'd probably have liked it more with subtitles."[3]

References[]


  1502: "Funnybot" edit
Story Elements

XJ-212 FunnybotSandy CervixChristian WulffAngela MerkelTyler Perry1st Annual Comedy AwardsThe Hollywood Minute

Media

ImagesScriptWatch Episode

Release

South Park: The Complete Fifteenth Season

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