It Hits the Fan

"It Hits the Fan" is the first episode of Season Five, and the 66th overall episode of South Park. It aired on June 20, 2001. This episode made #8 on the list of "10 South Parks That Changed The World."

Synopsis
South Park takes its place among that elite group of shows that have made television history when Cartman proclaims the "S" word for the entire world to hear. The you-know-what hits the fan 162 times when the citizens of South Park tune in to hear the word "shit" on a popular TV show. This epic utterance triggers a chain of events that threatens the world as we know it, leaving Chef and the boys to save the day.

Plot
Kyle has tickets to go to The Lion King on ice, but Cartman tells him that the HBC crime show Cop Drama was going to use the word shit. This leads to widespread acceptance of the word, even in schools, causing people to say it constantly, in casual and often illogical conversation. An example would be when Mr. Garrison randomly sang "Shitty Shitty Fag Fag" to the tune of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang after he realized he could say shit and fag (because he is homosexual). People start spewing up their intestines, so action is taken—the boys ask Chef to take them into the HBC Head Office to sort it out. Research proves that the word is actually a literal "curse(d) word," and its constant utterance has caused a resurgence of the Bubonic Plague just as it did in England hundreds of years earlier. A special live event, Must Shit TV (marketed as "4 hours of pure shit"), also called The Night of a Million Shits, in which episodes of existing shows are taped live with almost every word of dialogue replaced with the word shit, goes ahead anyway until the boys come back and tell everyone that curse words are actually cursed. However, by this point the word has been said enough to awaken a demonic dragon named Geldon (with a voice just like Cartman's; Cartman comments, "Man, what a stupid voice"), which Kyle destroys with an ancient magical tablet belonging to a knight in The Knights of Standards and Practices. The moral of the story is not that saying shit is wrong per se, but saying it in excess leads to a curse on the world.