Trey Parker, the South Park co-creator who works best six days from airtime

Trey Parker

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	October 19, 1969 Conifer, Colorado, United States
Occupation	Animator and filmmaker
Known for	South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Despicable Me 3, Bowling for Columbine
Awards	Emmy · Peabody · 4 Tony Award · Grammy · Television Academy Hall of Fame

Every episode of South Park is written, animated and delivered in about six days, and Trey Parker writes most of it, directs it and voices a good part of the town himself. The schedule is a choice. He and Matt Stone have long said the deadline makes the show funnier, because nobody has time to second-guess a joke. The method made him one of the richest people in television comedy, and it throws an odd light on the one project that has slipped away from him: a live-action comedy, produced with Kendrick Lamar, that has been shot, dated, undated and apologized for.

Randolph Severn Parker III grew up in Conifer, in the Colorado foothills west of Denver, the son of a geologist and an insurance saleswoman; the nickname Trey marks him as the third Randolph Parker in the family. A shy kid in honors classes, he worshipped Monty Python and found his real classroom in community theater, down to playing Danny Zuko in his high school’s Grease. After a semester at Berklee College of Music he studied film and Japanese at the University of Colorado Boulder. In a film class there he met Matt Stone, a math student from nearby Littleton who shared his taste for Python and his distrust of anyone in charge.

Parker, born on October 19, 1969, shot films with Stone almost every week at Boulder. A cutout-animation short for his animation class, American History, won him a Student Academy Award in 1992. Next came a fake trailer for a musical about Alferd Packer, the nineteenth-century Colorado prospector accused of cannibalism. Pushed by the film department’s chairman to make the whole thing, Parker raised $125,000 from friends and family and shot it in freezing weather on Loveland Pass. Sundance never answered their submission, so they rented a hotel conference room near the festival and screened it themselves. Troma later released it as Cannibal! The Musical.

Los Angeles was slower. Orgazmo, his comedy about a Mormon missionary moonlighting as a porn star, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was then crippled by an NC-17 rating. What broke the pair open was The Spirit of Christmas, a crude cutout short commissioned in 1995 by the Fox executive Brian Graden as a video Christmas card, in which Jesus fights Santa while four foul-mouthed boys watch. Copies leaked online and it became one of the first viral videos. Comedy Central asked for a series, and South Park premiered in August 1997, quickly turning a small cable channel into a force. They took nearly every offer that followed, including the leads in David Zucker’s BASEketball, a flop.

The success they expected to fade instead paid for a film. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, which Parker directed in 1999, grossed $83 million as a full-blown musical, and “Blame Canada”, the song he wrote with Marc Shaiman, was nominated for the Academy Award. They went to the ceremony in dresses and on LSD, and lost to Phil Collins. Stephen Sondheim sent Parker a letter calling it the best movie musical in fifteen years, which Parker has said meant more to him than an Oscar. In 2004 Team America: World Police sent marionettes into the war on terror, and Sondheim wrote again, this time asking whether Parker would ever write a stage musical with him.

The stage came anyway. With Robert Lopez, co-writer of Avenue Q, Parker and Stone spent eight years building The Book of Mormon, about two young missionaries posted to Uganda. It opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway on March 24, 2011, with Parker co-directing alongside Casey Nicholaw, and won nine Tony Awards, four of them his, plus a Grammy for the cast album.

The creed behind all of it is equal-opportunity contempt. “It’s got to all be OK or none of it is,” Parker told ABC’s Nightline in 2006, and he has called himself a registered libertarian who finds as much to mock on the left as on the right. The stance is easy to hold from outside the room and harder once you own it. In 2021 he and Stone bought Casa Bonita, the cliff-diving Mexican restaurant in Lakewood, Colorado, a childhood favorite they had already lampooned on the show, for $3.1 million. They spent about $40 million rebuilding it and reopened it in 2023 paying every employee $30 an hour with no tipping. In October 2025, 57 of its performers struck for at least three days over pay and safety, and the Actors’ Equity president, Brooke Shields, criticized the owners in public. Two men who built a career on mocking corporate bosses found themselves on the boss’s side of a picket line, a reversal their both-sides creed has no ready joke for.

Business has never been better. A $900 million deal with ViacomCBS in 2021 committed them to six more seasons and 14 streaming films. In July 2025 they signed a five-year agreement that moved the show exclusively to Paramount+ at a reported $1.5 billion, and the season that followed opened by putting Donald Trump in bed with Satan. Along the way Parker voiced the villain Balthazar Bratt in Despicable Me 3 and, through the AI studio Deep Voodoo, made the deepfake comedy Sassy Justice and the deepfakes in Kendrick Lamar’s video “The Heart Part 5”.

This year brought the formal canonization. The Television Academy named Parker and Stone to its Hall of Fame in June, and they were inducted in August. Parker also lent his voice to Illumination’s Minions & Monsters, released in July. On September 16 South Park began its 29th season billed as “South America”, a dig at Trump’s habit of renaming places, with new episodes every other Wednesday through November 25.

The film is where the method breaks down. Written by Vernon Chatman, a longtime South Park producer, and directed by Parker, Whitney Springs follows a young Black man interning as a slave reenactor at a living-history museum who discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his. It was first dated for July 4, 2025, then for March 20, 2026. In November 2025 it was postponed indefinitely, and in September 2026 Parker and Stone apologized publicly, took responsibility for the delays and said they still believed in it. No new date has been given.

Parker’s first marriage, to Emma Sugiyama, was officiated by Norman Lear in 2006 and ended two years later. He married Boogie Tillmon in 2014; they filed for divorce in 2019 and co-parent their daughter.

He has spent nearly three decades proving he can get a finished episode on the air every week with no time to spare. The current season wraps on November 25, and the one project that gave him all the time he wanted is still waiting for a date.