15 pieces of pop culture that may have been influenced by South Park

NEW YORK – JUNE 2: Author David Sedaris signs a book for a fan at the Symphony Space with David Sedaris presents selected shorts June 2, 2004 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

David Sedaris is among the most well-respected and prolific satirist of our modern world, so it might be unseemly to suggest that he is riding the South Park wave. However, if it weren’t for the folks at Comedy Central making satire and parody so accessible, us regular folks might not think to turn to Sedaris.

Outside of The New Yorker and Atlantic audiences, Sedaris could be considered a little hard to approach, but audiences are so well versed in the art of sarcasm and irony, thanks to South Park. Sedaris‘  work is like the polished, older brother of the show, home from college to talk about all the cool stuff he’s learned.

Me Talk Pretty One Day was published in 2000 and is a collection of essays written by Sedaris and the content covers everything from his upbringing in Raleigh, North Carolina to his life in France with his partner, Hugh. The stories are chock full of pithy one-liners and clever phrases that make it almost impossible not to quote the text regularly.

For audiences that felt very smart because they understood the ironic wit of South Park, reading Sedaris is like a graduation for them. While South Park might be elementary arithmetic, Talk Pretty is advanced Calculus. You can’t really have one without the other, and South Park offers an infrastructure for spoof and mockery.

Best of: “When sh** brings you down, just say ‘f**k it’, and eat yourself some motherf******* candy.” And, “I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”