South Park.

Mr. Klinghoffer is NR's literary editor.

WARNING: There's no way to write about the cartoon series South Park without alluding to things that would make any normal person queasy: flatulence, flatulence that causes flames to burst from a character's rear end, an anal probe, more flatulence, a talking mound of excrement, explosive diarrhea, plus from the third-grade protagonists, unrelenting vulgar language that can't be reprinted in NR. Such stuff is the very point of this, the hottest show on television.

"Hottest" doesn't mean "most watched." But the 4.5 million souls who clicked on to the Christmas special are nothing to sneeze at (31.3 million typically watch Seinfeld), and from a marketing viewpoint South Park is a weighty phenomenon. Since it premiered in August, fans have bought $30 million worth of South Park T-shirts alone, along with quantities of refrigerator magnets, greeting cards, calendars, and bumper stickers. You see the T-shirts on sale everywhere in Manhattan.

Nor does "hottest" mean "best," since South Park is just a more obscene knock-off of Beavis and Butt-head mated with a much less funny knock-off of The Simpsons, the best show on television. (Though South Park's Valentine's Day special, with many smirking references to lesbianism, had moments as funny as anything on The Simpsons.) What it means is that, God help us, South Park has managed to generate excitement among TV viewers like nothing since the early days of Beavis and Butt-head and The Simpsons. Recently it was on the covers of Rolling Stone and Spin magazines simultaneously.

Thought up by a couple of twentysomethings, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the show recounts the adventures of four cute little boys. The setting is perpetually snowed-in South Park, Colorado. Artistically speaking, paper cut-outs of kids bundled in parkas have been scanned onto computers; the images are then moved across a static background for a naive look that's actually charming.

In one episode, the fat kid, Cartman, is abducted by space aliens, who perform an anal probe on him. At the climax, an eighty-foot radar dish emerges from his rear orifice and beams a signal to flying saucers.

In another, the mother of Cartman's buddy Kyle is offended by a TV cartoon show that has won the devotion of all the kids in South Park. This idea was swiped from the cartoon-within-a-cartoon on The Simpsons, "Itchy & Scratchy," except on "Terrance & Phillip" the characters do nothing but break wind or talk about breaking wind. Kyle's mom leads a protest outside the headquarters of the cable channel that produces the cartoon -- Cartoon Central, a reference to Comedy Central, the TV home of South Park. The protest succeeds when an epidemic of explosive diarrhea among the protestors overwhelms the portable toilets -- and, well, you get the picture. As stated by one boy, Stan, the moral is: "Damn it! You know, I think that if parents would spend less time worrying about what their kids watch on TV, and more time worrying about what's going on in their kids' lives, this world would be a much better place."

THE depiction of gross bodily functions upsets normal people. That's because drawing a decorous curtain around things like that is one way we confirm for ourselves that we're not animals. In a weird way, the fact that so many people find South Park hilarious is good news. Outrageousness makes us laugh, and it comes as something of a relief that explosive diarrhea on TV is still considered outrageous. Despite the efforts of secularists to convince us that we're all animals anyway, with everything that implies by way of loosened standards of what's proper and improper, Americans still resist the idea. For now.

Of course people find humor in all sorts of things besides outrageousness. It's just the lowest, easiest way to get a laugh. The not-very-good news is that so many Americans evidently find outrageous humor funnier than any other kind. What a person laughs at is the most accurate intelligence test ever invented. Since August, our estimated national IQ has dropped a few points.

But that's not what is really regrettable about the show. The other source of South Park amusement is that prized, aggravating quality of the Nineties sensibility: irony.

Creators Stone and Parker specialize in it. As film students they made features titled Cannibal: The Musical and Giant Beaver of Southern Sri Lanka. The two came to the attention of Hollywood by producing a five-minute short, "The Spirit of Christmas." In this, Santa Claus and Jesus fight each other "Mortal Kombat"-style while the South Park kids stand by cursing ("Dude, don't say 'pigf -- -- ' in front of Jesus!"). According to Rolling Stone, they'll soon have their first real movie out: Ogazmo, about "an earnest, soon-to-be-married, martial-arts-obsessed Mormon who gets caught up spending boogie nights in the porn game in order to pay for a church wedding."

The formula for ironic humor is numbingly ironclad. You just take one concept suggestive of convention and normality (a musical, a Mormon), and link it with an unrelated, somehow transgressive concept (cannibals, pornography). Thus half the laughs in South Park are supposed to come from the fact that we're watching adorable animated children talk the way these talk, and do other things children don't normally do on TV, like die gruesomely. The show's famous tag line is "Oh my God! They killed Kenny!" which Stan blurts out every episode after his friend Kenny has been impaled on a flagpole, crushed by hot lava, whatever. Then rats come and devour him. By the start of the next episode, he has been restored to life.

When a Rolling Stone writer accompanied Stone and Parker to an appearance on the Tonight show the pair bumped into Jerry Springer on the NBC lot and proceeded to ironically fawn on him. They exclaimed that they watch his schlocky talk show for inspiration: "Oh, my God! It's Jerry Springer! Now everything's been worthwhile!"

The appeal of irony is simple. By chuckling at it you remind yourself what a jaded, cynical -- i.e., cool -- person you are, how high you fly above the dowdy heads of those old folks and other squares who find irony mystifying or offensive. As Susan Sontag once explained, homosexuals love camp -- defined as the juxtaposition of heightened emotion with cheesy art (as in Barbra Streisand's music) -- because it affirms that life isn't to be taken seriously. Thus their characteristic activity needn't make them feel guilty. Irony is camp for heterosexuals, although its payoff is to set you above conventionality in general, not just conventional sex rules.

Of course some irony is cleverer than other irony. South Park is irony for dumb-dumbs, the worst kind.