Trey Parker and Matt Stone Got a Call From a Perplexed David Blaine After ‘South Park’ Mocked Him
South Park landed on many celebrities’ hit lists after mocking them on the show. Kanye West and Barbra Streisand responded directly to the show, although Streisand later attended a showing of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. When they did an episode about David Blaine, the magician called them up days later.
[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for the South Park episode “Super Best Friends.”]
The Season 5 episode “Super Best Friends” has David Blaine leading a cult. In the DVD commentary for the episode, Parker and Stone say they had to explain one of their jokes to the magician himself.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone invented a new word for David Blaine
“Super Best Friends” aired July 1, 2001. At the time, Blaine was famous for recent stunts like standing in a block of ice. Of course, he did not provide his own voice to South Park. As is often the case, Parker and Stone did their own impressions, which they acknowledge are poor. In South Park, Blaine would end his sentences saying, “Twaaaa.”
“We didn’t really know David Blaine or anything,” Parker said. “We had just seen some of his specials. Everyone wonders. We had him do this thing, ‘Twaaa.’ Everyone’s like what is that? Even David Blaine was like, ‘What is twaaa?’ We’re like, ‘I don’t know. It just sort of came out.’”
Matt Stone explains where he got David Blaine’s new word
For Parker, “Twaaa” was just a random sound. Stone said he got it from someone he knew.
“I had a friend in high school that we called Twaaa because he always said that,” Stone said. “He was a heavy metal guy. He always kind of talked like that. ‘Hey, you guys want to come over and play some guitar? Twaaa.’ I don’t know why he said twaaa but we just made David Blaine say it. We just started saying it with David Blaine. It doesn’t make any sense.”
David Blaine told Trey Parker and Matt Stone fans were confused about this ‘South Park’ joke
In “Super Best Friends,” Blaine hooks the people of South Park on his book Blainetology. The boys join up too, but soon discover Blaine runs a cult and won’t let them leave. Blaine told Parker and Stone that some of his fans believed he really wrote Blainetology.
“David Blaine actually called us two days after this episode aired and he said that people were asking him for his Blainetology book and not joking,” Parker said. “They were like, ‘Well, they made fun of your Blainetology book on South Park but I’d like to read it.’ He was like, ‘No, I don’t have one, twaaa.’”
