Butters may be gullible and constantly bullied, but at least he’s TikTok famous now.
The character, who is a mainstay of the adult series South Park, gets the hero edit on TikTok. Over the past few months, fans have been creating catchy videos highlighting their favorite Butters moments, much to the delight of many. At the time of publication, his hashtag has more than 1.2 billion viewswith the best videos as many as 4.9 million views.
The idolization of the character is accompanied by a more general resurgence of interest in South Park spread on TikTok. The animated show is a long-running raunchy comedy created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It debuted in 1997 and is currently airing its 26th season. The series follows the antics of four college boys in a Colorado town. It is most famous for its often offensive and irreverent sense of humouras well as the simplistic and distinctive visual style.
Butters isn’t technically a member of the official group of four main characters, but he’s a mainstay on the show, regularly featuring heavily in episodes. As a character, he tends to play the goody two-shoes role, and has a rather docile and gullible disposition. This means he’s often the target of pranks and abuse from other characters on the show, and it’s endeared him to fans.
In the TikTok below, we see moments of Carter and Butters spending time together as a sped-up, pitched version of Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Put Your Records On” plays in the background.
It is important to note that this is so South Park we’re talking about this, so some clips use a wide variety of explicit and derogatory language, including racial slurs and sexually explicit language. (The most liked clip on TikTok contains such language, so we didn’t include it here.)
Another important part of the series is that Butters is constantly afraid of his parents, who abuse him and regularly ground him. So some edits include sympathetic clips of Butters crying, like the one below.
While Butters is often the one bullied by the group of friends, he has his moments when he lashes out. People have picked moments when he’s particularly cold and edited them into heavy trap beats with dramatic breaks between clips to build hype throughout the video.
Other hyped videos highlight the moments when Butter takes on his alter ego, Professor Chaos.
Unlike many media trends that can go in and out of style, South Park never really went away. It is on the wane in terms of its cultural relevance as the show has been airing continuously since 1997. Similarly, Butters has long been a silent star of TikTok. His voice was behind TikTok trends like the “It’s okay if you’re gay, Butters, I don’t care“sound and”kill John Lennon” sounds. Still, the Butters trends of the past few months have catapulted the show to a new level of fame in what has become one of the world’s most popular apps.
