Top 10 Times Cartman Was the BEST Character on South Park

If “South Park” has taught us anything, it’s that there is nothing more dangerous than Cartman with "authoritah." After being assigned as South Park Elementary’s latest Hall Monitor, Cartman takes his new role to the extreme to enforce the school’s hallway code. He even dresses the part, Dog the Bounty hunter style. Ironically, despite his excessive and questionable methods, Cartman’s antics end up exposing an illegal relationship between Ike Brofloski and his teacher. He even goes on a manhunt to bring her to justice, albeit only for her not having a hall pass and breaking hallway code rules. Nonetheless, it’s equal parts surprising and funny to see Cartman use his unusual quirks for good instead of evil.

Even with the best of intentions, getting back at Cartman can potentially make a bad situation even worse. After Cartman’s latest actions cause widespread discrimination against kids with red hair, his friends give him a taste of his own medicine by turning him into the very thing he despises. While their plan works at first, it leads to Cartman radicalizing the town’s red haired children, forcing them to take extreme actions, such as abducting other kids and attempting to wipe them out. Thankfully, Kyle is able to eventually reveal the truth to Cartman before further chaos can ensue. Nonetheless, we can’t help but be entertained at how easily Cartman can turn an unfavorable situation into a very dangerous opportunity.

What starts out as Cartman’s latest attempt to mess with Butters backfires in the most hilarious way. While trying to uncover Butters’ embarrassing secrets, Cartman manages to gain his trust by pretending to be a robot named the Awesome-O 4000. However, Cartman soon learns that Butters actually has evidence of his own embarrassing secret. Desperate to find said evidence, Cartman is forced to maintain his robot persona 24/7, which leads him to forgo all basic human necessities, pitch hundreds of Adam Sandler movie ideas to Hollywood executives, and even get abducted by the U.S. government. When Cartman’s deception is finally revealed, Butters follows through with his threat, giving him a dose of much deserved karma.

With the exception of Kyle, there is nothing that Cartman hates more than hippies. When hippies arrive in South Park in droves, Cartman takes immediate action to protect the town. Unfortunately, Cartman’s warnings that something more sinister is at work involving the hippies are ignored and he is even arrested for imprisoning them in his basement. In a surprising twist, Cartman’s concerns are in fact very valid as a legion of hippies threaten to swallow all of South Park with a hippie music festival. In the end, Cartman becomes the town’s final hope and manages to put together a surprisingly ingenious plan to deal with them. Not only does Cartman succeed in saving the town, he gets to enjoy a much deserved reward at Kyle’s expense.

When it comes to KFC, not only does Cartman enjoy it, but he is completely addicted to it. In Season 14’s “Medicinal Fried Chicken”, KFC becomes illegal in the state of Colorado, forcing Cartman to turn to a criminal enterprise to satisfy his addiction. While Cartman does get access to all the KFC he can eat and then some, he indulges too much of his own supply, completely ignoring his duties in running his illegal business. Needless to say, this ends up ruffling the Colonel’s feathers and decides to teach Cartman a lesson by taking a page out of ScarFace’s own Alejandro Sosa’s handbook.

Among the many stupid things Cartman has done over the years, the steps he took to get a certain video game console ranks pretty high on the list. Unable to wait three weeks for the Nintendo Wii, Cartman concludes that his only remaining option is to freeze himself until it finally comes out. Unfortunately, his plan encounters (quite literally) a whole avalanche of problems. The biggest being that instead of three weeks, he wakes up five hundred years into the future and finds himself in the middle of a conflict between different atheist factions and highly intelligent space otters. If you think that is nuts, the steps he takes to get back home are even weirder. Hope it was all worth it Cartman.

For Cartman, there is no lie too big or scheme too dastardly if it means going to Casa Bonita. After Kyle decides to have his birthday party there, he invites his friends with the exception of Cartman for…obvious reasons. Desperate to enjoy the restaurant’s many amenities, Cartman decides to concoct a scheme whereby he lies to Butters, who was one of the people invited to the birthday, that the world has ended. He also kidnaps him, sending the entire town into a panic. In the end, Cartman’s scheme gets exposed, but before he can be apprehended, he speed runs through Casa Bonita, ending with a literal fall from grace. Despite all the damage he caused with his lies, in Cartman’s warped mind, the end result more than justified the means.

As intelligent and manipulative as Cartman has shown himself to be, he’s equally prone to moments of unbelievable stupidity. After Cartman ruins his friends’ KFC dinner, the latter decide to completely ignore him. This leads Cartman to come to the conclusion that he must be dead. Believing that the only way for him to pass on to the afterlife is to “make it right”, Cartman forces Butters to help him. He proceeds to make amends with everyone he’s ever wronged over the course of the series. He even saves a group of people who were being held hostage. In the end, Cartman learns the truth and the realization infuriates him. rather than accept his mistake, Cartman predictably takes his frustration out on Butters.

Even though Cartman has done a lot of bad stuff, no one can deny that he took a bullet for everyone. 40 years into the future, Cartman, who is a rabbi with a loving family, attempts to interfere with a plan that would save everyone from the COVID pandemic. While it looks as though Cartman is reverting back to his old ways out of his intense dislike for Kyle, his family convinces him otherwise, claiming that even with the future changed, they can still reunite with one another. In the end, Cartman doesn’t go through with it and he even goes on to save Kyle, the whole world, and future, by extension. Unfortunately, while everyone else benefits from the new future, the same can’t be said for Cartman.

When it comes to some of the worst and most horrifying things that Cartman has done, his final act of revenge against Scott Tenorman is most likely his most infamous. After he naively falls for a con orchestrated by the teenager, Cartman attempts to get his revenge. Unfortunately, all of Cartman’s plans not only end in failure, but also end with him being even more humiliated by Scott. All of this only drives Cartman further over the edge as he decides that embarrassing Scott is no longer enough. To do so, Cartman goes full Hannibal Lecter and orchestrates a vendetta that culminates in him feeding Scott chili with quite the horrifying ingredient. Suffice to say, everyone in South park learned a valuable lesson that day.