The South Park Legacy Roll: from Kyle's Cousin Kyle to Season 28'S Resurgence
Eric Cartman's defining character trait during the first five seasons was crude, repetitive prejudice. He attacked Kyle Broflovski daily with textbook anti-Semitic barbs. Broflovski, athletic, intelligent, and socially integrated, reacted with righteous fury. The dynamic was reliable, but by Season 5, it risked becoming repetitive.
Enter Kyle Schwartz.
Parker and Stone engineered the character to test Cartman's obsession. If you hand Cartman a walking, talking caricature of an over-sheltered, frail East Coast boy who whines about air filters and hoards treasury bonds, Cartman should win effortlessly. Cartman fails completely. He tries to bribe the boy with forty dollars to leave town on a bus; Kyle Schwartz takes the cash, calculates compound interest, and stays anyway.
The real target of the joke was never Judaism. The target was Kyle Broflovski's desperate desire to fit in with his peers. Broflovski is horrified not because his cousin is dangerous, but because his cousin is deeply uncool. The cousin's obsession with money is rooted in pragmatic asset allocation, not greed. At the end of "The Entity," when Garrison's invention is banned by the government, Kyle Schwartz walks away with $5 million in government bailout compensation because he held airline stock, dryly telling his cousin, "I told you airline stock was a safe bet."
The satire stripped Cartman of his power by rendering his bigotry irrelevant. You cannot insult someone who cares more about the humidity of the room than your opinion of his heritage.
