Easy South Park Trivia Questions
Start here. These are the facts that stick after a few episodes: who made the show, where it is set, what Cartman eats and what colour Kenny's parka is. Nobody should need a second guess, which makes this the right round to open a pub quiz or a group chat with, because it gets everyone scoring before the deep cuts arrive.
One thing worth knowing before you read the answers: the town is not invented out of nothing. South Park is a real place name in Colorado, a high grassland basin in Park County, and Trey Parker grew up in Conifer, about an hour's drive from it. The mountain backdrops behind the bus stop are a joke only if you have never driven US-285.
If you are running these aloud, read the question and count to five. Half the fun of an easy round is watching somebody talk themselves out of the right answer.
Q1.Which two writers created South Park?Tap to reveal
Answer: Trey Parker and Matt Stone
The pair met as film students at the University of Colorado Boulder and have written, directed and voiced most of the show between them ever since.
Q2.The town of South Park is in which U.S. state?Tap to reveal
Answer: Colorado
South Park is a real high-altitude basin in Park County, Colorado, which is where the name comes from.
Q3.On which cable channel did South Park premiere in 1997?Tap to reveal
Answer: Comedy Central
The first episode aired on 13 August 1997, and new seasons have run on Comedy Central ever since, with the feature-length specials going to Paramount+.
Q4.What do the boys shout whenever Kenny is killed off?Tap to reveal
Answer: “Oh my God, they killed Kenny!” — “You bastards!”
Stan delivers the line and Kyle answers it with “You bastards!” It ran in almost every episode of the first five seasons before the show retired the gag.
Q5.What colour is Kenny's parka?Tap to reveal
Answer: Orange
The hood covers his mouth, which is why every one of his lines is muffled into gibberish that only the other boys can understand.
Q6.What is Eric Cartman's favourite snack food?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cheesy Poofs
The fictional cheese puff brand has its own jingle on the show and has been sold as a real snack more than once.
Q7.Which country do the residents of South Park habitually blame for everything?Tap to reveal
Answer: Canada
The running joke is big enough to have carried a feature film: "Blame Canada" is the song from the 1999 movie that ended up nominated for an Academy Award.
Q8.What is the name of the school the four boys attend?Tap to reveal
Answer: South Park Elementary
It gives the show its supporting cast. For the first decade that meant Principal Victoria in the office, Chef in the cafeteria, Mr. Mackey in the counsellor's chair and Mr. Garrison at the front of the class; the building has since replaced two of the four, but the classroom is still where most episodes start.
Q9.Kyle Broflovski has an adopted baby brother. What is his name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ike
Ike was adopted from Canada, which is a recurring problem for a family living in a town that blames Canada for everything.
Q10.What colour is Kenny's hair, on the rare occasions the hood comes off?Tap to reveal
Answer: Blond
The parka hides it for most of the run, so the reveal only happens in episodes where Kenny is out of costume.
Q11.Which member of the school staff ends almost every sentence with "m'kay"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mr. Mackey
He is the school counsellor, and the verbal tic is so fused to the character that the writers use it to mark his dialogue on the page.
South Park Character Trivia
The four boys get the attention, but South Park runs on its bench: the uncle with the hunting shop, the bus driver who screams, the counsellor with the tic, the classmate who drinks too much coffee. This round is about them.
It is also where the show's oldest trivia answer has gone stale. For twelve years the joke was that Cartman had no father, because a season 2 punchline made his mother both parents at once. In the 2010 two-parter "200" and "201" that was thrown out entirely: Cartman's father is Jack Tenorman, a Denver Broncos player, which retroactively makes Scott Tenorman, from "Scott Tenorman Must Die", his half-brother. Any quiz still asking who Cartman's father is with the old answer has been wrong since 2010, which is why that question is not on this page.
A second character note that trips people up: Butters and Tweek were both, at different moments, the show's fourth boy. They are not interchangeable and the order matters, which the episode round below gets into.
Q1.What is Butters' real first and last name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Leopold Stotch
"Butters" is a nickname. When he snaps and invents a supervillain alter ego, he becomes Professor Chaos.
Q2.Which jittery, blond classmate can never button his shirt and shakes his way through every scene?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tweek (Tweek Tweak)
His parents run the town coffee shop and have been feeding him their product since he was small, which the show offers as the explanation for the twitching.
Q3.Jimbo Kern, the gun-loving owner of the hunting shop, is the uncle of which of the four boys?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stan
Jimbo and his Vietnam buddy Ned are the show's standing joke about men who want to shoot something and need a legal excuse first.
Q4.What is the first name of Cartman's mother?Tap to reveal
Answer: Liane
Liane Cartman's indulgence of her son is the engine behind most of his schemes; she is the reason he has never once been told no.
Q5.What is Eric Cartman's middle name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Theodore
Eric Theodore Cartman. The full name usually turns up when an authority figure is about to read him the riot act.
Q6.What is the name of Cartman's pet pig?Tap to reveal
Answer: Fluffy
Fluffy appears as far back as the first season, part of a small menagerie that also includes his cat.
Q7.Which character delivers the line "There are no stupid questions, just stupid people"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mr. Garrison
It is the boys' teacher, not one of the boys, and it is one of the earliest lines the show gave him.
Q8.Who is the school bus driver forever screaming "Sit down and shut up!"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mrs. Crabtree
The bus stop and the bus are where a large share of early episodes open, which gave her more screen time than a bus driver has any right to.
Q9.What is the name of Stan's father, and what does he do for a living?Tap to reveal
Answer: Randy Marsh, a geologist
The geology job is the setup for dozens of plots: it is the reason Randy keeps being the one man in town with a professional opinion about the disaster of the week.
Q10.Which recurring character is the son of Satan?Tap to reveal
Answer: Damien
He arrives as the new kid in a first-season episode named after him, complete with an ominous chanting choir whenever he appears on screen.
Q11.Chef interrupts the boys' questions by breaking into song about what?Tap to reveal
Answer: Making sweet love to a woman
The boys come to him for advice; he answers roughly a third of the time and sings the rest, which is the joke.
Episode and Storyline Trivia
This round is for people who watched rather than remembered. The episodes it draws on run from the 1997 pilot through the mid-2000s, the stretch that produced most of the show's quotable material.
The Kenny questions at the end are worth reading in order, because most quizzes get them wrong. Kenny died for good in “Kenny Dies”, the second-to-last episode of season 5, and stayed dead. Butters was promoted to fourth boy at the start of season 6, then dropped when he became Professor Chaos, and Tweek took the slot for the back half of the season. Kenny came back in the season 6 finale, "Red Sleigh Down". Three different answers, all correct, all about the same vacancy.
One more piece of context for the Cartman questions: "Christian Rock Hard" and "Simpsons Already Did It" come from seasons 6 and 7, the run where the writers stopped treating Cartman as a loud child and started treating him as a competent operator. It is why his schemes from that era actually work.
Q1.What was the title of South Park's very first episode, broadcast on 13 August 1997?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe"
It was animated with real construction paper and stop motion, the only episode made that way; everything after it uses software that imitates the look.
Q2.What slogan is painted on the side of Officer Barbrady's patrol car?Tap to reveal
Answer: "To Patronize and Annoy"
A straight parody of "To Protect and Serve", and an accurate summary of the South Park Police Department's record.
Q3.In the episode "Volcano", Cartman invents a campfire monster with celery for one hand and an actor for one leg. What is it called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Scuzzlebutt
The leg is Patrick Duffy. The payoff is that Scuzzlebutt turns out to be real and the boys meet him.
Q4.In "How to Eat with Your Butt", the Thompsons' missing son shares his name with which Hollywood actor?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ben Affleck
The whole episode hangs on a missing-child poster, and the name is the punchline the town never reacts to.
Q5.What was the name of Cartman's Christian rock band?Tap to reveal
Answer: Faith + 1
He formed it on a ten-dollar bet with Kyle that he could go platinum before the other boys' band, Moop. The album sells enormously and then the joke lands: the Christian record industry awards gold, frankincense and myrrh, not platinum, so he is handed a myrrh album and loses the bet.
Q6.In "Simpsons Already Did It", Cartman is worshipped as a god by which miniature creatures?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Sea People
They are sea monkeys he ordered by mail. They build him a statue, which goes about as well as every other thing Cartman is put in charge of.
Q7.In "Cartoon Wars", which rival animated series does Cartman campaign to get taken off the air?Tap to reveal
Answer: Family Guy
The two-parter's running gag is that Family Guy's jokes are written by manatees pushing idea balls around a tank.
Q8.Which real Denver Broncos quarterback do the boys treat as a local deity, to the point that a statue of him stands in the town?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Elway
Elway runs through the early seasons as South Park's home-town sporting god — name-checked, statued and finally sold as a toy. The town's Broncos obsession is also what eventually settled Cartman's paternity: the father revealed in 2010, Jack Tenorman, played for the same team.
Q9.In "Freak Strike", which real daytime talk show do the boys get onto in order to collect the gifts handed to guests?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Maury Povich show
The episode is built around the era of daytime television that rewarded guests for having the most extreme problem in the room.
Q10.In which season was Kenny absent from the show, leaving the group a boy short?Tap to reveal
Answer: Season 6
He died in “Kenny Dies”, the penultimate episode of season 5, broadcast on 5 December 2001, and was gone for almost all of season 6, returning only in the finale, “Red Sleigh Down”.
Q11.Which character was promoted to fourth member of the group in Kenny's absence?Tap to reveal
Answer: Butters
He got the slot, and his own showcase episode, before being dropped again when the writers turned him into Professor Chaos.
Q12.After Butters lost the job, which classmate filled the fourth-boy slot for the rest of season 6?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tweek
The show made the audition literal: the boys openly interview replacements, which is the closest South Park has come to admitting the vacancy existed.
Behind the Scenes, Records and Feuds
South Park is made faster than almost anything else in American animation. For most of its run a regular episode has been written, animated and delivered inside about a week, a process documented in the 2011 film 6 Days to Air. That schedule is the whole reason the show can put a news story from Wednesday on screen by the following Wednesday. The cut-paper look came first — the 1995 short and the 1997 pilot were made with real construction paper — but the deadline is why it was never traded for something slower to draw.
It has also made the show a reliable generator of fights. The Scientology episode cost it Isaac Hayes, who had voiced Chef since the first season and stopped in March 2006; the character was written out weeks later. A 2001 episode set a broadcast swearing record on purpose, complete with an on-screen counter. And the show has collected Primetime Emmys for animation along the way, including one for an episode made inside World of Warcraft with Blizzard's cooperation.
The questions below cover the making of it: the short film that started everything, the movie, the Oscar nomination, and how Kenny's voice is actually recorded.
Q1.Which 1995 animated short, made as a video Christmas card for a television executive, led directly to the series?Tap to reveal
Answer: "The Spirit of Christmas" (the Jesus vs. Santa version)
It was copied onto the early internet and passed around on VHS, making it one of the first videos to go viral before anyone used that word.
Q2.The show's animation is designed to imitate what physical material?Tap to reveal
Answer: Construction paper cutouts
Only the pilot was actually made that way. Everything since has been produced on computers that deliberately reproduce the jagged paper edges.
Q3.What is the title of the 1999 South Park feature film?Tap to reveal
Answer: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
It is a full musical, with songs by Trey Parker and Marc Shaiman, and it was released just two years into the show's run.
Q4.Which song from the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Blame Canada"
It lost to Phil Collins' "You'll Be in My Heart", but not before being performed live at the ceremony by Robin Williams.
Q5.Which Grammy-winning soul singer voiced Chef?Tap to reveal
Answer: Isaac Hayes
Hayes voiced the character from the first season until 2006, when he stopped in the fallout from the Scientology episode. Chef was written out in “The Return of Chef”, the season 10 premiere, on 22 March 2006.
Q6.Kenny's voice is muffled before it ever reaches post-production. How does Matt Stone do it?Tap to reveal
Answer: He speaks with his mouth covered — into his sleeve or his hand
The muffling happens at the microphone rather than being layered on afterwards, which is why the rhythm of the lines still reads as speech and the other boys can answer him.
Q7.Which Hollywood star was widely reported to have pressured Comedy Central's parent company over the Scientology episode "Trapped in the Closet"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tom Cruise
A scheduled repeat was pulled in March 2006. Parker and Stone responded in public and the episode was back on air later that year.
Q8.In the 2001 episode "It Hits the Fan", an on-screen counter tallied uses of a single unbleeped swear word. How high did it get?Tap to reveal
Answer: 162
The episode was built around the idea that saying the word on television was suddenly permitted, and the counter in the corner of the screen was the joke's punchline.
Q9.Which South Park episode, produced with Blizzard's cooperation and set largely inside World of Warcraft, won a Primetime Emmy?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Make Love, Not Warcraft"
Much of it is machinima recorded in the game itself, which is why the in-game scenes look nothing like the rest of the show.
Q10.What does Cartman demand when he puts on a police uniform?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Respect my authoritah!"
It comes from the season 2 episode in which he is deputised, and it has outlived almost every other catchphrase the show has produced.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best South Park trivia questions to start with?
Start with the ones that only need a few episodes of exposure: the state the town is in, the colour of Kenny's parka, what Cartman eats, which country gets blamed for everything. Save the character and episode rounds for people who have watched properly. A mixed group scores better and argues less if you open easy and escalate, rather than leading with a season 6 deep cut.
Who is Cartman's father in South Park?
Jack Tenorman, a Denver Broncos player, as revealed in the 2010 two-part episode "200" and "201". That answer replaced a twelve-year-old running joke from season 2, and it means Scott Tenorman, the boy from "Scott Tenorman Must Die", is Cartman's half-brother. Trivia lists written before 2010 still give the old answer, and it is no longer correct.
Why did Kenny stop dying in every episode?
The writers got tired of the gag. Kenny was killed permanently in “Kenny Dies”, the penultimate episode of season 5, and stayed out of the show for almost all of season 6, with Butters and then Tweek filling the fourth-boy slot. He returned in the season 6 finale, “Red Sleigh Down”, and since then his deaths have been occasional rather than weekly.
When did South Park first air?
13 August 1997, on Comedy Central, with the episode "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe". It grew out of a 1995 short film called "The Spirit of Christmas" that Trey Parker and Matt Stone made as a video Christmas card, which spread across the early internet and got them the series commission.
Why did Isaac Hayes leave South Park?
Hayes, who had voiced Chef since 1997, stopped voicing him in March 2006, in the fallout from the Scientology episode “Trapped in the Closet”. The character was written out weeks later in “The Return of Chef”, an episode that dealt with his departure directly. Chef has never been a regular part of the cast since.
How long does it take to make an episode of South Park?
About six days, from script to broadcast, which is extraordinarily fast for animation. The 2011 documentary 6 Days to Air follows one episode through that week. The schedule is why the show can respond to news almost as it happens, and why the deliberately crude cut-paper look has never been traded for anything more laborious to draw.
