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Kenny McCormick
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Kenny McCormick is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is one of the four central characters along with Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Eric Cartman. His oft-muffled and indiscernible speech, the result of his parka hood covering his mouth, is provided by co-creator Matt Stone. In a cameo appearance in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Mike Judge provided the voice for Kenny's one line of uninsulated dialogue. He first appeared in The Spirit of Christmas shorts created by Stone and long time collaborator Trey Parker in 1992 (Jesus vs. Frosty) and 1995 (Jesus vs. Santa).
Kenny is a nine-year-old fourth-grade student living with his relatively poor family in the fictional town of South Park, Colorado.
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Kenny McCormick is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is one of the four central characters along with Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Eric Cartman. His oft-muffled and indiscernible speech, the result of his parka hood covering his mouth, is provided by co-creator Matt Stone. In a cameo appearance in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Mike Judge provided the voice for Kenny's one line of uninsulated dialogue. He first appeared in The Spirit of Christmas shorts created by Stone and long time collaborator Trey Parker in 1992 (Jesus vs. Frosty) and 1995 (Jesus vs. Santa).
Kenny is a nine-year-old fourth-grade student living with his relatively poor family in the fictional town of South Park, Colorado. In a running gag most prevalent during the first five seasons of the series, Kenny would die in nearly each episode before returning in the next with little or no explanation given. Since then, the practice of killing Kenny each week has been largely abandoned by the show's creators.
Character
Kenny is loosely based on a childhood friend of Parker who was also named Kenny; the poorest kid in the neighborhood, he would wear a tightly-drawn orange parka that muffled his speech. When developing the character, the show's creators had observed that most groups of childhood friends in small middle-class towns always included "the one poor kid", and decided to portray Kenny in this light, as well as portraying him as being eager to do and say disgusting things in an attempt to impress others.
Kenny made his first appearance as an unnamed character in the "Jesus vs. Frosty" short. He appeared again in the "Jesus vs. Santa" short three years later, where he is first referred to as "Kenny". Kenny comes from a poor household, resided over by his violent, alcoholic and unemployed parents, Stuart and Carol McCormick. Kenny has an older brother, Kevin, and an unspecified younger female sharing Kevin's features has been shown amongst his family.
Kenny is fond of toilet humor and pornography, and when it comes to sexually-related subjects, he is the most knowledgeable of the group. Others will typically ask for his explanation of sexual matters unknown to them.
Kenny gets along generally well with his friends Stan and Kyle. Kenny's friendship with Cartman is more complex. Cartman often teases Kenny about his poverty, with Kenny usually reacting angrily. Kenny wrote in his will that he did not like Cartman, but "felt sorry" for him. On the other hand, it has been indicated that Kenny and Cartman consider themselves to be best friends. The two are often the only ones to laugh at the other's jokes or antics. In "Rainforest Schmainforest", Kenny begins a relationship with a girl named Kelly, and in the following episode, he is on his way to see her when he spontaneously combusts.
Appearance
In tradition with the show's animation style, Kenny is composed of simple geometrical shapes, and is not offered the same free range of motion associated with hand-drawn characters. In the show's earliest episodes, he was composed of construction paper cutouts and animated through the use of stop motion. Kenny is now animated with computer software, though he is portrayed to give the impression that the show still utilizes its original technique.
Kenny wears an orange parka that incorporates a hood that is always tightly drawn, covering his entire face except for his eyes. As a result, all of Kenny's spoken lines are heavily muffled. While his friends understand him easily, adult residents often have problems understanding Kenny's speech, requiring the others to translate for him. Closed-caption encoding depicts Kenny's speech as if it were intelligible. Sometimes, when he is frightened, he will tighten the cords on his hood to hide even more of his face.
In "Good Times with Weapons" and "Starvin' Marvin", Kenny is shown to have blue eyes. He first appeared without his hood in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, where it was revealed that he had messy blond hair. Following the movie, he has been seen without it on a few more occasions, and also speaks unmuffled during some of these instances.
Deaths
Prior to season six, Kenny died in almost every episode, with only a handful of exceptions. This was often followed by the catchphrase "Oh my God, they killed Kenny! ...You bastards!" (or some variation of it), usually said by Stan and Kyle. Stone and Parker revealed that when Stan or Kyle would exclaim "they" and "you bastards" to apparently no one in particular, they are actually referring to Stone and Parker themselves, as though they were an omnipresence within the show's universe. It was also common for a number of rats to suddenly appear and begin picking at his corpse.
The practice of killing off the character in each of the show's earlier episodes was inspired by the real-life Kenny's tendency to skip school for days at a time. This would provoke Parker and his other friends to jokingly assume that he had actually died, and then act as if nothing had happened when the character's namesake would eventually resume attending class and join them at the school bus stop.
Following his death in "Kenny Dies", he failed to reappear in several of the following episodes, having seemingly been killed off for good by the show's creators. Despite this, Kenny returned to the show less than one year later, first as a spirit possessing Cartman in "A Ladder to Heaven", then as his old self in "Red Sleigh Down". Since then, Kenny has died in only a small number of episodes, most recently in the Season 11 finale, "The List".
Kenny's deaths and the "Oh my God! They killed Kenny!" catchphrase are well known in popular culture, and have appeared on various pieces of merchandise, from T-shirts to guitar straps (like the one used by The Police guitarist Andy Summers), and inspired the rap song "Kenny's Dead" by Master P, which was featured on Chef Aid: The South Park Album.
In the book South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating, an essay by Southern Illinois University philosophy professor Dr. Randall Auxier, entitled "Killing Kenny: Our Daily Dose of Death", suggests that the fashion of the recurring gag serves to help the viewer become more comfortable with the inevitability of their own death.
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