Re: “OK, team, let’s focus on Polaris!”
So, I will guess the joke is that the North Star is NEVER visible from Antarctica?
Also, it brings up an interesting question - is there a South Star in the southern Hemisphere?
No, in the sense of a bright star near the celestial south pole. There is actually no "North Star", strictly speaking. Currently Polaris is about 0.7358° away from the Celestial North Pole.
From wikipedia Article on the pole star
The celestial pole will be nearest Polaris in 2100 and will thereafter become more distant. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of any of the visible pole stars.[9][10] However, at magnitude 3.67 (fourth magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible in light-polluted urban skies. During the 1st millennium BC, Beta Ursae Minoris ("Kochab") was the bright star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BC described the celestial pole as devoid of stars.[7][11] In the Roman era, the celestial pole was about equally distant between Polaris and Kochab.
There is a South Star, but it’s so dim (4th or 5th magnitude) that it’s not worth looking for. The name of it is Sigma Octantis.
There is not a singular, bright star directly over the South Pole.