‘South Park’ Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone Reveal Why They Made Fun of Ben Affleck Mercilessly

South Park has never pulled punches with celebrities. They’ve gone after Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Lopez and whoever is in the news the week they’re doing a show. However, one celebrity became a regular punching bag. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone went after Ben Affleck at least four times.

Parker and Stone spoke to reporters in a roundtable at the 2004 press junket for Team America: World Police. They had already attacked Affleck repeatedly on South Park by that point, and they explained why he was such a target for them. 

All the Ben Affleck jokes on ‘South Park’

In the South Park Season 5 episode “How to Eat with Your Butt,” Cartman discovers Stephen and Martha Thompson, two people suffering from Torsonic Polarity Syndrome. That means they have butts where their faces should be. They are looking for their long lost son, who in the end turns out to be Affleck. 

In the South Park Season 7 episode, “Fat Butt and Pancake Head,” Cartman turns his hand into Jennifer Lopez. This causes the record company to replace J-Lo with Cartman’s hand, and Affleck to fall in love with the hand puppet. This was in 2003 when Lopez and Affleck were a tabloid couple.

In the South Park Season 16 episode “Going Native,” Butters gets angry at all of Affleck’s success. However, by this 2012 episode, the kids admit that Argo was a good movie and they support his marriage to Jennifer Garner. 

Trey and Matt nail Ben Affleck in ‘Team America: World Police,’ too

Team America: World Police represented the third time Parker and Stone mocked Affleck, and the first outside of South Park. The song “The End of an Act” goes, “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor.” Further lyrics include, “I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting school. He was terrible in that film.” 

“To me, the brilliant thing about that song that Trey wrote [about] Pearl Harbor is that that movie misses the point about what Pearl Harbor meant to America so f*cking badly, it’s almost insane,” Stone said. “Also, Pearl Harbor is an amazing movie because you can actually take the event of Pearl Harbor out of the movie and it doesn’t change anything in the movie. That’s an amazing feat in filmmaking, that you can actually just take that whole sequence out of the movie and still everything would happen the same way. It’s just a horrible, horrible movie.”

Trey Parker and Matt Stone said Ben Affleck was perfect ‘South Park’ fodder 

Circa their third Affleck joke, Stone explained why they kept coming back to Affleck in South Park or movies. 

“He’s so ripe,” Stone said. “You can have fun with it.”

And, it was true. They did not stop mocking Affleck after Team America.

“I mean, look at him,” Parker said.