NASCAR is a such a well-known sport that now South Park has taken a crack at making fun of the sport in its entirety. I personally like South Park and when I found out that they were going to do a parody on NASCAR I had to watch it and write an article on it for all of you that did not watch it. It aired this past Wednesday, October 6, 2010 on Comedy Central.

For school, the students had to write about what they wanted to be when they grow up and one of the students, Cartman, was very upset about having to write a paper on the subject because he feels that he has to be poor and stupid to be in NASCAR and he is neither of those two things. In order to become stupid, he goes to the store and ingests Vagisil because the commercial stated one of the side effects being short-term memory loss.

After ingesting the Vagisil, he steals #34 Evans’s car in the Denver 400 race and since he does not know how to drive, he slams straight into the wall and starts driving backwards towards the field. Unfortunately, he causes a lot of damage to the car and ends up going over the pit road wall into the lake. Because of this incident, he is later hospitalized and wants to do it again.

Whenever Cartman goes back, he receives a sponsored car from Vagisil. At the driver’s conference, he sits there next to Dale Earnhart Jr., Jimmy Johnson, Danica Patrick, Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, and Matt Kenseth, repeating everything they say and picking fights with them. It is hilarious because he makes himself as stupid as possible and after the conference, Cartman says that he thinks that Jimmy Johnson is stupider than spit.

I think this parody shows how some people think about NASCAR as a sport. It is a common stereotype that NASCAR is for stupid people. Even though it originated in the southern United States, NASCAR has became a much respected sport throughout North America. NASCAR is now an internationally known sport and many people do not understand the passion that the drivers and fans have for this sport. In my own opinion, if more people would be open-minded to try to understand NASCAR: the history, the fans, the terminology, everything that is NASCAR, there would be more NASCAR fans than there are now.