"The Ring"

The Jonas Brothers are everywhere—even in South Park.

Not the real Jonases, mind you: Their South Park doppelgängers don’t share much in common with their flesh-and-blood cohorts, other than hairstyles, an aw-shucks demeanor and—oh yeah, promise rings.

The plot, in a nutshell, is this: Kenny hooks up with an "experienced" fifth grader who (everybody knows) performed oral sex on her last boyfriend in a parking lot. Kenny’s jazzed about going steady with a "notorious whore," as his friends put it, and when he finds out that the Jonas Brothers make her all "tingly," he buys tickets to a concert. His sexually inspired plot backfires when his girlfriend is brought backstage to meet the JBs, who make her promise to wear … a promise ring.

The episode is staggeringly profane (nine f-words, along with a host of other curses and crudities). It is steeped in sexuality—from graphic innuendo to titillating language to a phallus made from snow. And it’s at times brutally violent. (Blood flies when a mean Mickey Mouse beats the tar out of one of the Jonases.)

Those things are barely worth commenting on a dozen years after South Park was spawned as an exercise in cable license. It’s always been crude, rude and socially unacceptable. But the themes at play here are worth closer examination:

In the world of South Park, promise rings aren’t as much sincere pledges of celibacy as they are cynical marketing devices. "You have to wear the purity rings because that’s how we can sell sex to little girls," explains Mickey—in between obscenities.

"But we don’t want to be selling sex to little girls anymore!" protests Joe Jonas. Bad move. ’Cause that’s the line that gives the mouse his excuse to pound poor Joe into a pulp.

Interestingly—or oddly, as the case may be—the show seems to be actually standing up for the Jonas Brothers and, in a roundabout way, their innocent (read: Christian) fan base. It does so by pointing both of its animated barrels at Disney, showing Mickey spitting out a massive, anti-Christian tirade right before the credits, bragging about how he’s made "billions off Christian ignorance for decades now."

"That’s it, girls," says a Christian father who hears the whole rant on television. "No more Disney TV for a while."

On some submerged level, South Park has a point. Disney is surely aware of the need to make its charismatic pop stars palatable to parents. And the Jonas Brothers do foster a curious paradox: They’re handsome guys who preach purity and say all the right things while still inspiring legions of trembling tween and teen girls to shriek and faint in their presence.

But think about it a wee bit longer, and the satire doesn’t, um, ring true. There’s no evidence that Disney ever asked the Jonas Brothers to wear promise rings. The brothers—sons of a Christian minister who, we are told, pray backstage before every concert—say they wear these rings because they want to. Frankly, the rings would seem to make the Jonases less marketable in some ways.

Plus, really, what would Stone and Parker have them do differently? Girls have been squealing over distant paramours since puberty was invented. It seems that in the South Park ethos, the brothers would either have to turn overtly and sexually "adult"—apparently against their will—or disfigure themselves in appalling ways so as to not be quite as appealing.

Disney and the Jonas Brothers aren’t selling sex as much as they are the concept that being "good" and being "cool" aren’t mutually exclusive—a concept that South Park doesn’t quite get. In this fictional town, it seems, folks can only be one thing or the other: If you opt for "good" you also choose to be "boring." If you want to be "cool," you’ve got to swear a lot and try to get oral sex in a parking lot.

Editor’s Note: We watched this episode on the South Park website. Some of the harsher profanities may have been bleeped when it aired on Comedy Central.