Kenny McCormick

Template:South Park character Kenneth "Kenny" McCormick is a fictional character in the animated series South Park. Created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, he first appeared in the short films both entitled The Spirit of Christmas in 1992 and 1995. Kenny is one of four central characters in the show, all of whom are young boys growing up in the small town of South Park. He was taken off the show in season 6 when he had a more serious death in season 5 but he later returned at the very end of season 6 and he has been back ever since. Kenny is most famous for dying in nearly every episode in the first five seasons of South Park but now his deaths are rare in later seasons as he tends to survive to the end of the episodes. He is voiced by Matt Stone, although Mike Judge provided his voice in one scene from the feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.

Characterization

Kenny is the most knowledgeable of the group when it comes to sex, and he is usually portrayed as the most perverted. Often when an unknown sexual term is introduced to Stan, Kyle and Cartman, Kenny will be called upon by his friends to clarify, although sometimes Kenny doesn't know the meaning of the sexual term. His muffled responses are often met with laughter or further confusion. He has a passion for breasts as shown in the episode "Lil Crime Stoppers." His knowledge may be gleaned from his parents or from the pornography which Kenny is shown to possess (e.g. "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants"). He is usually the first to perform disgusting acts (drinking from Jimbo's gas tank, giving Howard Stern a hummer for money). Stan and Kyle noticed this behavior in "Fat Camp" and created the The Krazy Kenny Show which starred Kenny doing undesirable acts for money (such as eating mice, pretending to kill newborn babies in front of their mothers, and washing his hair in battery acid).

A South Park editor revealed what Kenny says in the beginning in every South Park intro (which, like most of his dialogue, is muffled by his parka).

• For the first 2 seasons he really says, "I like girls with deep vaginas, I like girls with big fat titties."
• From season 3 and beyond, it was changed to "I have got a ten inch penis, use your mouth if you want to clean it."
• For some of the later seasons, it was changed to "Someday I'll be old enough to stick my dick in Britney's butt," referring to Britney Spears.
• It Is Unknown what the Current Lines are.

Despite his sexual perversion, Kenny actually appears as the kindest and most laid-back of the group, always prepared to help his friends. When Butters was still an official friend in early Season 6 episodes, and showed reluctance to perform a task for the other three, they would always softly remark how Kenny would help them out. Indeed, several of his deaths are acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of others. One example of his sacrificial deaths is depicted in the episode "Jewbilee."

In The Biggest Douche in the Universe, Kenny is shown to be a fan of Rob Schneider. When Cartman refuses to watch Rob Schneider's films, Kenny's soul keeps trying to get him to change the channel back.

Kenny's birthday is on March 22nd.

Kenny is shown to have a large mastery of strategic videogaming in "Best Friends Forever", reaching Level 60 in the PSP Game "Heaven vs Hell", and was known by the angels as the heaven's equivalent of Keanu Reeves (Neo or Constantine). In "Make Love, Not Warcraft" he is a human hunter in the game World of Warcraft (a race/class combination not actually possible in the game). In Towelie, he plays the 2001 Okama Gamesphere with the other boys until his death, at which time Towelie takes his place.

Appearance and voice

Kenny almost always wears an orange hooded Snorkel Parka with brown gloves. Most of the time, Kenny has his hood on so that only his eyes are visible. Underneath his hood he has messy blonde hair. He also is shown to have almost nothing on underneath his parka. In the season 8 episode, "Good Times With Weapons", his anime self is shown to have blue eyes. Kenny is also shown to have blue eyes in the episode "Starvin' Marvin," in which a mutant turkey pulls out his eye in close-up, and a blue iris is momentarily visible.

A photorealistic version of Kenny's appearance was produced as a police artist sketch for the episode Free Willzyx.

Kenny speaks rarely, and he usually says only a few lines. He speaks clearly in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, The Jeffersons, and Lice Capades with proper, unmuffled lines. He says "yippee" in The Losing Edge and groans in The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000. In the episode How to Eat with Your Butt, Kenny's lines can be easily heard during the scene where the class get their school photos back, with those being "Oh, that's bullcrap!", and "You've ever done!?". In the German dubbed version his lines can easilly be heard. He also was screaming "No! No! Not the socks!", in the episode Lice Capades, while the rest of the boys are "sock-bathing" him.

Kenny's unmuffled voice sounds like a slightly higher-pitched version of Stan Marsh's. In the film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Kenny's voice is performed by Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill. In the Season 8 episode "The Jeffersons", Kenny's voice was performed by Matt Stone.

Family

Kenny's parents are Stuart and Carol McCormick. Stuart is an alcoholic, and the family is extremely poor because of this, subsisting on welfare (although a drug dealer in "Lil' Crime Stoppers" says the McCormicks run a meth lab), something for which his friends (especially Eric Cartman) often tease him. Kenny has two siblings: Kevin McCormick, and a little girl who seemingly has no name and apparently did not exist until the episode "Best Friends Forever." Because Kenny's family is so poor, they eat frozen waffles with no side dishes for dinner and bread sandwiches for breakfast. In Starvin' Marvin, Kenny won a can of green beans for his family, though they could not afford a can opener. Cartman frequently exploits his poverty by offering him money for performing strange or dangerous tasks. Kenny's poverty appears to be somewhat of a paradox at times, as he always manages to stay current with trends in toys and video games, such as maintaining a World of Warcraft subscription (and a computer to play it on), being the first kid to get a PSP in South Park, or buying the Chinpokomon dolls, and being the only child in the town to have a Go Go Action Bronco, a battery-powered miniature car. Of course, Kenny's family also won a lawsuit against Cartman in Cartmanland, gaining at least $500,000.

Relationships

Cartman generally seems to tolerate Kenny, although he regards him as being lesser than him because he is poor, and can even at times be seen to treat Kenny as sort of a general laborer/servant. However, Cartman does appear to consider Kenny as his best friend out of the other three boys, although he is not above exaggerating the depth of their friendship in order to achieve or obtain something he wants, usually after Kenny dies or is incapacitated, such as in the episode "Best Friends Forever". In the same episode, Kenny described his general attitude toward his friendship with Cartman as his feeling sorry for him, because everyone else hates him. However, it is also shown that the two share a "best friends forever" necklace (hence the title of the episode), and in the episode "Kenny Dies", Kenny seems to agree with Cartman's assessment that the two are best friends, as Kyle and Stan are.

Kenny will go along with Cartman if he talks about something he agrees on, or Kyle and Stan if he gets really annoyed by Cartman's attitude, such as the time he giggled uncontrollably when Cartman farted in Kyle's face in "Cancelled". On occasion, he is known to punch Cartman when Cartman rips on him for being poor.

Kenny briefly had a girlfriend named Kelly in "Rainforest Schmainforest" (she was first to admit her feelings for him), who came to his aid during one of his famous "death" scenes. In the next episode, "Spontaneous Combustion", he spends a lot of time at a new girlfriend's house but the viewer never sees her. Because Kenny had started dating Kelly in the previous episode, it is safe to assume that they are one and the same. Kelly hasn't been heard of since (although she was seen at the dance in Hooked on Monkey Phonics, possibly having arranged to meet up with Kenny, but not being able to as he is dead at that point).

Music

Kenny has shown a talent on the drums. For Rush's Snakes and Arrows tour, there is a video of the South Park boys attempting to play Tom Sawyer and Kenny is seen on the drums.

Kenny also trained to be an opera singer during the episode Quintuplets 2000 and was accepted into a Romanian music academy and hailed as a sensational singer at least by Romanian standards.

Death

Main articles: Kenny's deaths and List of Kenny's deaths

Kenny is best known in the show for his recurring death in nearly every episode of the first five seasons, often followed by some variant of "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" and "You bastards!" from his friends Stan and Kyle, respectively. The gag has many precedents, going back at least as far as the regular cry "You rotten swine! You've deaded me!" by Bluebottle voiced by Peter Sellers in The Goon Show in 1951. However, in the episode Cartoon Wars, Stan and Kyle say "you killed Kenny, hope you're happy". In the first few episodes, Kyle said the entire phrase. Later on, it varied, depending on who killed Kenny.

In episode 207 (season 2 episode 07) "City on the Edge of Forever", the boys are all retelling past events which incorrectly end in them eating ice cream and saying "Now that's what I call a sticky situation". Cartman recalls Kenny dying by fonzie after jumping over some school buses. Kyle promptly corrects him saying that that would be impossible, as Kenny had just died earlier in that very same episode (207).

Kenny has died and come back over 101 times in the South Park franchise (78 in the series, to date, two in the early animated shorts, six in other authorized TV parodies, six times in the video game, and twice in the movie (He burned to death, was brought back to life, then died when the baked potato used as his heart exploded). He is also killed nine different ways in the opening sequence.

Kenny died in almost all the episodes until the writers killed him off permanently in the fifth season, but he returned in the sixth season, when they dispensed with the practice of killing him in every episode, as they got bored with the joke. The reason why Kenny died continuously was given in an interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who stated vaguely that it was because Kenny is poor. Kenny is always resurrected for the next episode, although the explanations for his reappearence varied. One episode explained that his soul returns to his Mother, takes to another body, is reborn, and then grows to be 8 or 9 years old in record time, while another simply had Kenny magically reappearing out of thin air in the second part of a two-part episode after he was run over by a train in the first.

None of the other characters seem to find this at all unusual — Stan merely greeted Kenny when he materialized, and no one else even blinked. Kenny himself is sometimes aware of the fact that he is constantly killed, expressing resentment over the fact that Stan was worried about Kyle's impending death while never mourning Kenny and also opting to take home economics classes over wood shop, partly because he was afraid of getting killed by the dangerous power tools in the shop class. Also, in "Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo", Mr. Garrison asks Kenny to unplug some wires that were in a puddle of water. Kenny is scared at first, but does it and nothing happens. Later in the episode, Mr. Garrison again asks Kenny to climb up a partially broken ladder, over a shark tank, to take down a star, but nothing happens. At the end of the episode, Kyle and Stan say that something seems wrong and that something is missing, but then is says "The End", and Kenny cheers, since he did not die. However, it would seem that, unlike Stan and Kyle, Cartman is vaguely aware of Kenny's deaths, as he referred to them in "Cartmanland". Kenny dies in Cartman's theme park, and when lawyers suing him mention "That boy who died", Cartman replies with "Who, Kenny? He dies all the time". Stan and Kyle also express annoyance and displeasure at Kenny's repeated gory demise, with Stan frequently exclaiming "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" and Kyle answering with "You bastards!" (occasionally, these lines are delivered in an exasperated manner, as if the boys are bored of saying them). It would seem that the others are also aware of Kenny's deaths, but are quite nonchalant about them since they know he will re-appear. Also, in the episode "The Succubus," Cartman, who was blinded due to a failed Laser Eye Surgery procedure, asked if Kenny was okay after a Succubus rampaged, although this may be coincidence. Previously in the episode, the boys are seen waiting for Chef at the bus stop. The first scene shows the boys waiting. The next scene is at night, with the boys still waiting, but Kenny is dead, and being gnawed upon by rats. The third and final scene shows the boys still waiting, and Kenny is perfectly fine. Even Stan mentioned that Kenny died all the time in the episode "Gnomes", in which the gnomes accidentally crush Kenny, and mourn over this tragedy, but are confused as to why the kids don't seem to care. In another episode, Kenny eats antacid tablets, thinking they're mints, and drinks a lot of water afterward. When Kenny explodes, the main characters and Kyle's dad find it funny, and Stan says, "That was a good one." His last death was in Season 9 Best Friends Forever in which he was hit by ice cream truck and ended up in a vegetative state. Cartman tries to have Kenny's plug pulled by saying he was kenny's BFF but he his intentions were to own kenny's PSP. Kyle and Stan disagree with him due to Cartman's selfish reason. They decided to let him die after disrespecting his wishes of not appearing on TV in his vegetative which he had stated in his will. This death bared a resemblance to Terri Schiavo's case and she died a few hours later after this epiosde aired. He does not die in season 10, but Stan and Kyle's line have been used twice. Once, in Return of Chef the line was altered to "Oh My God They Killed Chef!" and twice in Make Love Not Warcraft, when his WoW character was killed by a high ranked player who went around killing other player's characters. Kenny has not yet had a death in Season 11.

Survival

Kenny survives a few episodes in the first five seasons, the first being Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, where he's instructed to do a number of dangerous things. These include unplugging a number of electrical cords whilst standing in a large puddle and climbing a tall rickety ladder over a shark tank to fetch a star in the rafters of a theater. The second time is in Flashbacks, in which the entire episode takes place within Stan's dream. Kenny only dies within the dream (and a false flashback that Cartman has in the dream). The third time is in the episode Rainforest Schmainforest when he is struck by lightning and then revived with CPR by his new girlfriend Kelly. The fourth time is in the Do the Handicapped Go to Hell?/Probably two-parter when he is run over by a bus in Part 1 and presumed dead. When the bus stops in Mexico in Part 2, he is scraped from underneath the bus by a Mexican man and found to still be alive. The fifth time Kenny escapes death is in Fat Camp. Instead, a kid from drug rehab who had previously been posing as Cartman is forced by Stan and Kyle to dress in Kenny's orange parka and climb into Ms. Crabtree's uterus as part of a television stunt. His dead body is later squeezed out, followed by the corpse of another kid resembling Harry Potter. In the fifth season episode Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow, Earth Day activists hack all of Kenny's limbs off, but he is not shown to die at any point in the episode.

The only death in Season 10 is in th videogame World Of Warcraft, he's killed online, but so is everyone else. Kenny is still alive at the end of the episode.

In addition to escaping death in a few episodes, Kenny does not appear in the episodes Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus, Cat Orgy, Two Guys Naked in a Hot Tub, Pip, and Hell on Earth 2006 and therefore does not die in any of these episodes.

References in other media

The Marvel Comics character Mr. Immortal is very similar to Kenny, since he is also always killed and always comes back to life.

The pyro in the video game Team Fortress 2 speaks with a muffled voice (due to his gas mask) which sound very similar to that of Kenny.

External links

• Kenny McCormick on SouthParkStudios.com
• Repository of translated Kenny-isms
• Kenny McCormick Biography ASK.com
• Kenny sings Opening Song in slow speed