How Kanye West responded to ‘South Park’ mocking him in 2009
The ‘Fishsticks’ episode of South Park is among the most notorious the show has ever produced, which is saying something. First broadcast in 2009, this episode went after a target who, in the years since, has become even more controversial: Kanye West.
This was before his marriage to Kim Kardashian and before his descent into antisemitic paranoia and cruelty. It was even before Ye interrupted Taylor Swift’s speech at the MTV Video Music Awards, which only occurred some months after the episode was first broadcast. These were, in other words, comparatively mellow days in the life and times of Ye.
But the South Park writers nonetheless felt it appropriate to make fun of him, given that, despite the fact his most controversial, bombastic days were still ahead of him, Ye had already started to develop a reputation as an egomaniac. That formed the basis of South Park’s depiction of him.
The episode revolves around a character, Jimmy, writing the “perfect joke,” which is essentially a series of questions to trick the person hearing them into admitting that they’re a gay fish. “So do you like fishsticks?” the questioner asks. “Yes,” comes the reply. “Do you like putting fish dicks in your mouth?” is the next question. When the other person answers in the affirmative, the questioner replies, “Then what are you? A gay fish?!”
The joke, in the episode, becomes a sensation, but one person who doesn’t get it is Kanye West. This a problem for Ye, because he believes himself to be a genius and a generational talent.
He is thus infuriated when others insist he doesn’t get the gag, sending him into a violent rampage. But, by the end of the show, Ye has actually decided to embrace that he is, in actual fact, a gay fish. He dives into the ocean and is seen happily swimming with, kissing, and humping fish.
It was a suitably absurd and cutting depiction of Kanye, as is South Park’s style, but, initially, it seemed that the real-life Ye had taken it quite well. In a blog entry posted after the show was broadcast, he admitted to being “murdered” by South Park, but he said it was “pretty funny.” While the depiction of him had hurt his feelings, he said, he was determined to work on his ego.
The post was a fairly rambling paragraph written all in caps, but, broadly speaking, it seemed he had taken the episode in good humour. But his frustration with the episode was perhaps expressed in his 2010 song ‘Gorgeous,’ in which he raps the line, “Choke a South Park writer with a fishstick.”
South Park has since gone after Ye again, as in 2013, when they mocked him and his then-fiancé Kardashian. They targeted him again a decade later, this time with his antisemitic outbursts forming the basis of their mockery.