I am sure that there were plenty of little rabbits that were corrupted by Bugs Bunny and many little coyotes were crippled by attempting to use heavy machinery to catch a road runner, just as there are human children who have imitated Beavis' burning something for the thrill.
There were things in Looney Tunes that I would shudder to show my kids today, particularly the times the shorts would end with someone committing suicide with a shot to the temple. But my point was that the goal hasn't always been subversiveness -- it used to be only humor.
Parker and Stone don't seem to believe that the two are separable. Or, maybe, they are just incapable of being funny without being crude.
Yeah, and is subversiveness always bad? If a cartoon shows people that the liberal emperor has no clothes, is this a good or bad type of "subversion?" When the PC liberal sacred cows are skewered is this bad because the PC liberals run the institutions?
Parker and Stone don't seem to believe that the two are separable. Or, maybe, they are just incapable of being funny without being crude.
I would venture that they probably are incapable of being one without the other. But the point is that this is a crude society we are in. If Parker and Stone tried to use goody goody ideas and language they would fail. It is precisely because they capture the crudeness of the age that their speaking out against the pieties of the age are even taken note of.
I would venture that some of the teens and young adults who titter at the crude jokes will mature into well-adjusted folks who don't think fart jokes are funny, but who will remember that sexual harrassment hysteria or "save the planet" stuff is a shallow fraud.
SD