If you haven't seen the newest episode of South Park, I suggest you either watch it and read later. With that said I'm going to talk about the new episode entitled "Ass Burgers."
So the show starts off with the myth surfacing that you can get Asperger's from vaccines at a young age. Nothing new here. Just an old study that's kept on resurfacing ever since ever so long ago. Let's move on. We've got Cartman not wanting to get a shot, so I guess he just wanted to get out of it by saying he has "Ass burgers" as he put it after frying up some hamburgers, wrapping them, and sticking them in his pants. Yep, the old "Ass burgers" joke. You can see that coming. To many of us with Aspergers, that's an old joke. Some of us take it in stride and think it's funny ourselves and then there are other aspies that are down right offended by it. Really, I don't care. Even I thought it was funny when I first heard it, but South Park picks up and runs with it the rest of the episode and they make it funny again.
The other part of the episode picks up where last season left off where Stan is depressed and thinks everything is sh** after his parents divorce. His mopey attitude lands him with the school counselor where after talking with Stan, Mr. Macky calls the school nurse and asks if they gave him a flu shot last year. Again, the "vaccines may cause autism" myth is brought up. But let's look at this again. Depression or melancholy is common with some aspies. Seeing things in a bad light may be another. Stan has lost touch with his friends. He has no social life anymore. Problems among friends is common. Eventually Randy makes a big deal over how the school made Stan "mentally incapacitated." Which I guess means Randy thinks it made him stupid or "retarded" as a word used by some people, which we know is far from the truth. Randy always overreacts to things he knows nothing about, so that's classic Randy, right there. Just like classic Cartman who carries on the "Ass-Burgers" joke throughout the episode.
So Stan is taken to a special place where there are people with Aspergers. One is blowing bubbles out his butt. Another is peeing on the wall. This reflects on how ignorant people are about the disorder. And of course when Stan enters the room, they stop acting and get back to their regular selves. So we can see Matt and Trey don't think we're stupid or anything. It's just them saying "Ok folks, get real. Aspies aren't stupid or mentally retarded or anything like that." However when the group changes their act they go on and say that asperger's doesn't exist. They tell Stan that he probably sees the world as shi**y and that they see things for the way they really are. Does that sound familiar to you? Aspies are commonly very opinionated about the things around them. I know I am at times. lol. Then they go on to say that aliens made things this way and that to other people it doesn't look shi**y. Ah, another parallel to aspergers. A lot of people try to describe aspergers as if the person with AS feels like an alien on another planet. It's like you don't really understand people very well in a general sense. So NTs look like aliens to us and we feel like aliens compared to them. We have this separation in our social IQ, hence the whole alien thing that the characters talk about. The group tries to get Stan to blend in to find the alien base. That's what many older, more experienced aspies try to help newly diagnosed people to do. They try to blend in. They try to meet NTs half way. Blending in isn't bad when you're trying to be socialable as long as you stay true to yourself. Just ignore the alcohol use in the episode. It's just there to make it look more like they're using some disguise to blend in.
To be honest this episode didn't really outright try to teach anyone about AS. The part where one aspie says that aspergers isn't real wasn't Matt and Trey trying to say that. Obviously, because this was said by a character that was meant to be taken seriously. Matt and Trey had no stance. They had no intent on really outwardly telling everyone what AS is like. It wasn't like the episode where Cartman tried to fake tourette syndrome. That one was in your face about what that syndrome was. This was a little less in your face about what AS was. This actually seemed a little more intelligent in a way and in a way not. They very much wove into the episode a very very small general summary of what AS is and how uneducated people like Randy saw it. Actually it more or less made everyone that doesn't have it look like they didn't get it.
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