When Did South Park Characters Stop Calling Things 'Gay'?

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Answer by Michael McGraw-Herdeg,


This pejorative use doesn't actually seem as common as I remember!

Looks like there was a bit of a decline after Season 7 (2003 or so) but when there are spikes in usage it is usually narrowly confined to a few episodes in the season. Here are the counts:


This measurement, based on crude word counts, isn't perfect because I'm just looking for the string "gay" and not looking at all at the context in which it is used.

But it does (correctly, I think) show that in Season 15 the word was not used at all!

Methodology here was to pull (I think) all the transcripts from the "South Park Scriptorium":



Then I searched through them with:



(All the hard work here is due to the fine folks at The South Park Scriptorium.)

More questions on South Park (TV series):

• How does South Park get away with using so many corporate logos and celebrities?
• Who is the better singer, Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, or Eric Cartman?
• Which is the darkest South Park episode that you've ever seen?