"Now it's like, 'What's "South Park" going to do this week about Hurricane Katrina?' "

The tribulations of Matt Stone and Trey Parker:

"I don't know what we're going to do. We should do an episode about how the town can't wait to see this show and what they're going to do about Hurricane Katrina." (They may complain, but they can't help themselves: on tonight's episode, a beaver dam breaks, causing a flood in a neighboring town. Assigning blame becomes the top priority.)

Sounds great. I'll watch. I'm so ready to see everyone skewered re Katrina, especially those who so self-righteously skewered exactly the people they were already politically opposed to.

Doug Herzog, Comedy Central's president, said: "For Matt and Trey, life is still a term paper. They put it under the professor's door at 11:59."

This crunch is what allows "South Park" to comment in real time on zeitgeist themes, from news headlines to video-game releases, but it's a harried process. Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker begin the Thursday-to-Wednesday week in the writers' room, where they throw around ideas. When they hit on ones that might work, Mr. Parker writes individual scenes so that the animators can begin creating the actual episode. As days pass, those scenes add up to 21 minutes with, eventually, a beginning, an end and a plot. As for how they arrive at an episode's larger narrative, Mr. Parker described the different approaches: "Do we come at it from, 'Remember this from third grade'? Do we come at it from, 'This happened on the news'?"

It must be that part what gives the show its spirit is the dash to clip diverse ideas together -- riffing on the news and pop culture and tossing it together with things from one's own life.

You can see why it's just what a blogger would love.