1999 Chef: Chocolate Salty Balls (P.S. I Love You)

Just like The Simpsons before them, I've not watched much South Park in my time. Again, what I've seen I've enjoyed and the reason I haven't seen more is down to lack of time rather than inclination. There are only so many hours in the day etc. What I have seen though is enough for me to fill in the back story behind 'Chocolate Salty Balls' - without that knowledge, it becomes a more rum proposition all round. Based around what's barely a single enterndre, South Park's Chef (brilliantly voiced by Isaac Hayes) invites us to "Suck on my chocolate salty balls, they're packed full of vitamins and good for you, So suck on my balls" over a loving, Rick Rubin produced pastiche of Stax soul to the titters of schoolkids and the shudder of prudes everywhere. Of course, the good Chef is talking up a recipe for these balls ("Quarter cup of unsweetened chocolate and a half a cup of brandy. And throw in a bag or two of sugar and just a pinch of vanilla") and nothing more nasty. Isn't he?

Ah who can tell, but pause a while to marvel at such a song sitting at the top of the charts; can it be said to be a kind of 'progress' to hear "Say everybody have you seen my balls they're big and salty and brown" at number one when the equally crude lavatory humour of, say, Judge Dredd, couldn't get arrested as far as media exposure went in the seventies? Maybe, but I'm not convinced that the great British establishment had unlaced their corsets by that much in the nineties (lest we forget, the BBC banned Lil Louis' 'French Kiss' in 1989 just for its heavy breathing) and would it have gone quite so unnoticed had it been the product of that third cog of the trinity of nineties cult animation, the two man moral panic that was Beavis And Butthead? Probably not, but to be honest 'Chocolate Salty Balls' is so close to the knuckle I'm more inclined to see it as something that slipped through the gaps when no-one was looking than the po-faced finding a sense of humour. Hayes helps with the subterfuge no end - sure, it's a one note joke stretched thin on the rack of bad taste, but the fact that he sings it with a complete lack of nudge nudge, as if he's not in on it that joke, adds to the humour tremendously. Humour? Oh yes, 'Chocolate Salty Balls' is still a hoot that makes me laugh, but what makes me laugh more is that as an exercise in 'getting away with it, it's second to none.