30 most shocking South Park moments ever

6. South Park mocks many recently deceased celebrities at once

The summer of 2009 was a particularly rough year for celebrities. Famous folk kept dropping like flies, one after the another, in a never-ending parade of death. The types of celebrities range from singers like Michael Jackson to television personalities like Bea Arthur. And all of the big name celebs that died that summer are featured in the season 13 episode “Dead Celebrities”.

Famous pitchman Billy Mays is the first dead celebrity mocked on the show, having died of heart disease a few months prior. In ghost form, he continues to hock products to the South Park boys. David Carradine is showing wearing a noose, a joke on his death due to auto-erotic asphyxiation. Patrick Swayze and Farrah Fawcett, both cancer victims who left us that summer, are also in the episode.

I suppose the idea of the episode is to not only satirize the dead celebrities themselves, but America’s fascination with celebrity death. But given how recent all of these still were, accusations of being tasteless plagued the episode. It doesn’t help that in the end, all of the dead celebs’ ghosts are rounded up onto an airplane which transports them to Hell.