Butt Out

"Butt Out" is episode 713 of the Comedy Central series South Park. It originally aired on December 3, 2003.

The episode pokes fun at the formulaic storyline of some South Park episodes (including the movie), which start with the boys getting themselves in trouble and incite a controversy between the townsfolk and a national interest group (or a major catastrophe) while trying to avoid punishments, subsequently learning a lesson from this conflict.

Plot
An overly upbeat anti-smoking group called Butt Out, which incorporates elements of dance and hip-hop into its routine, performs at South Park Elementary, which brings out a mixture of boredom, annoyance, confusion, and fear in the boys (Kenny starts eating his own hand). At the end, Butt Out enthusiastically calls out "If you don't smoke, you can grow up to be JUST LIKE US!"

Not wanting to be anything like Butt Out, the boys take up smoking that afternoon. When caught by Mr. Mackey, they discard their still-lit cigarettes into a nearby dumpster, which causes a fire and proceeds to burn the whole school down. The parents all come into the burned down school and are initially very angry at their children (not for burning down the school, but for smoking), until Mrs. Broflovski blames it on the tobacco companies brainwashing them. The other parents follow suit, and the boys are happy to transfer the blame in order to avoid being grounded for three weeks, although Kyle, recognizing the classic pattern of a South Park story line, foresees it getting out of hand.

The town then calls in Rob Reiner in order to combat the spread of smoking among children in South Park. Despite the fact that Reiner is against smoking, he is seen eating large amounts of junk food (another unhealthy pursuit) on an almost constant basis, even when he's giving a speech about how harmful smoking is to your body. He is loved by Cartman because "He just goes around imposing his will on other people; he's my idol." The rest of the boys are suspicious of him as he attempts to use them in order to get Colorado to pass a ban on smoking in public.

Reiner, disguised as a woman named "Rita Poon," gets a tobacco company to give them a tour around a factory near South Park. Reiner planned to sabotage the company by taking the boys there and then taking a picture of them in the factory and photoshopping it ("You've just been Reiner'd!"). However, the tobacco company reveals how important the tobacco industry has been to the country as a whole, workers there are in fact really nice and everybody employed there looks really happy and friendly; they appear to be perfectly aware of the dangers of smoking but allow people to have the freedom to smoke. By contrast, Reiner's anti-smoking group is a group of Boris-and Natasha-style madmen who speak in Peter Lorre esque voices.

Feeling they need to push their agenda further, Reiner asks for one of the boys to appear in an anti-smoking commercial in which he says he is dying of second hand smoke. While Stan, Kyle and Kenny want nothing more to do with Reiner and his group, Cartman is excited at the chance, and assumes the other boys are as well. Cartman makes the comercial and afterwards, is confused by how his dialogue says he will be dead. He is then offered a questionable cupcake by one of Reiner's associates, while Reiner tells Cartman that he needs to sacrifice himself for the sake of the Anti-smoking movement. Fearful, Cartman escapes, and seeks the help of Stan, Kyle, and Kenny, who after much convincing, agree to help him.

Eventually, as Kyle predicted, they end up back at the cigarette factory where the townspeople, bearing torches, demand the factory hand them over. Reiner reveals his plan to the townspeople that he does indeed intend to kill Cartman, at which point they turn against him. Cartman stabs Reiner with a fork causing mass amounts of goo to come out of him, killing him. The boys then admit to their moms that they had smoked on their own free will, and are then grounded.

Trivia

 * This episode defends smokers, although both Trey Parker and Matt Stone are non-smokers (Stone admits that he used to be, but quit). They explained that they did the episode mostly because they think Rob Reiner is a "big fat ass", and because they were tired of loved ones being assaulted by people criticizing them for smoking.
 * Rob Reiner was previously criticized for "using children to pull at the heart strings of the public" in the episode "Gnomes", but this time a full episode is devoted to it.
 * When this episode first aired on Comedy Central, it ended after Cartman groaned over being grounded. All reruns and the DVD version include a short scene after that where Stan tells Kyle that the boys learned their lesson, but Kyle, upset over no one heeding his warning about avoiding the big showdown near the end, calmly mutters, "No, we didn't, dude. No we didn't" and walks away.
 * Cartman refers to the Kyle shying away from doing the commercial by calling him a liar and using the something called the Serbian Jew Double-Bluff
 * Creator Trey Parker admits to a slight feeling of guilt in portraying Reiner so mercilessly, claiming he liked some of his earlier movies and was inspired by Spinal Tap to fuse music and comedy.
 * At the end, Cartman says "Aw, awww!" which is usually stans line.

References to popular culture

 * The people working for Rob Reiner bear a resemblance to those the character Winston Smith describes working at the Ministry of Truth in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
 * The man who first tells Cartman to eat the cupcake greatly resembles Gríma Wormtongue or Dracula, and even shares some of his characteristics. His black trench coat with an overly stiff collar and clique logo on the heart is a direct reference to Pink from Pink Floyd The Wall. Notably, Pink's character and his clique (the walking hammers) were also Fascist.
 * Reiner's cry of "My goo! My precious goo!" is also reminiscent of Oogie Boogie's final words in Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. His death is similar to that of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.
 * Rob Reiner tells the tobacco company "You've just been Reiner'd!", a reference to Punk'd and The Jamie Kennedy Experiment.
 * Amongst the crowd of people welcoming Reiner is a man with a sign reading "Welcome Meathead". This is a reference to Reiner's most well known performance as Mike Stivic in All in the Family, where he was called "meathead" by Archie Bunker.