Wit & Attitude Quote by Trey Parker

Parker’s jab lands because it’s less about “Hollywood” as a zip code and more about a posture: the grown-up voice that keeps slipping into American entertainment, even when it’s wearing a superhero cape or a prestige-drama smirk. The line is built like a two-part trap. First, “regular people as children” accuses the industry of paternalism. Then the kicker - “they think they’re the smart ones” - flips the moral hierarchy, suggesting the real naivete belongs to the tastemakers convinced they’re educating the masses.

The subtext is classic Parker: contempt for sanctimony, especially the kind that arrives disguised as compassion. It’s not anti-intellectual so much as anti-lecture. “Tell the idiots… how to be” points at a specific cultural habit: scripts and celebrity activism that mistake messaging for meaning, and confuse audience agreement with audience respect. When entertainment becomes a civics class, the viewer is recast as a problem to manage, not a person to move.

Context matters. Parker, via South Park, built a career on puncturing institutional certainty - liberal, conservative, corporate, whatever. That show’s defining move is to treat everyone as fallible and to treat “important conversations” as ripe for self-delusion. In that light, the quote reads like a defense of adult audiences: people can handle ambiguity, can make their own moral calls, can even be wrong without needing a studio-appointed babysitter. It’s also a warning to Hollywood itself: the moment you start speaking down, you stop being persuasive and start being fuel.