“And sure, he’s probably so insane with rage that he’d butcher you horribly if he could.” – Homer Simpson

Yesterday, it was noted in many, many different places that Zombie Simpsons mentioned the censoring of last week’s South Park in the chalkboard gag:

There are two ways to look at this.  The first (and this seems to be the dominant on-line opinion) is to see it as a nice gesture from Zombie Simpsons, a show of support for South Park in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.  The second (which I’m more inclined to take) is a lot less positive.

First, set aside all the other issues at play here, from war and torture to religious extremism and censorship.  What happened on South Park was a brave act (at least as brave as one can be making cartoons for a living), the point of which was to demonstrate that fear about showing Mohammed is overblown.  The “death threats” that got such wide press came from an obscure website run by a nobody with no connection to anything (scroll down to point 2 in the update here to see what I mean).  Everyone pitched a fit except Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who remained quite calm and basically said that they wouldn’t give in to hysteria.  The fundamental point they were making (last week and in 2006) is that such fear is unfounded, and that the real problem is the absurd overreaction to empty threats.

Yet there’s Zombie Simpsons, declaring themselves “so scared”.  I understand that they’re trying to be supportive in a funny way.  But what Zombie Simpsons actually did was reinforce and legitimize the overhyped fear that Parker and Stone were explicitly attacking.  They could’ve said “South Park-We Support You And Wanted To Say [Bleeeeeeeeeeeep]”, or “South Park-We’d Stand By You If We Thought It Mattered”, or anything that didn’t say that they were afraid.  Instead, they bought right into the hysterical framework that South Park was criticizing.

Like all Zombie Simpsons, it was well meaning but brainless, and they’d have been better off not saying anything.