# South Park's creators say two little words can make any story boring.

- Series: [How It's Clipped](https://miu.fm/howitsclipped.md)
- Premieres: 2026-11-04
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitsclipped/south-park-s-creators-say-two-little-words-can-make-any

## Story

South Park's creators say two little words can make any story boring.

In September 2011 Trey Parker and Matt Stone surprised a freshman storytelling class at NYU on its first day. Parker told them a rule "that maybe you guys have all heard before, but it took us a long time to learn it": take the beats of your outline, and if the words "and then" belong between them, "you got something pretty boring". "What should happen between every beat that you've written down is either the word therefore or but." In the same clip he says one whole wall of their writers' room is a whiteboard split into three acts.

So we put one tiny story on a wall of our own, five cards, and told it twice. First with "and then": Line has a kite, and then there's no wind, and then it runs. Then the same five cards with "but" and "therefore", where each card is caused by the one before. Stone: "that gives you the causation between each beat." The idea is old (Aristotle split events that happen because of each other from ones that merely come after), and Parker didn't claim it as theirs.

Our own cut paper, whiteboard and Line; no South Park frames, characters or sounds.

Which film would you say passes their test?

Sources: mtvU, "Stand In: Trey Parker and Matt Stone Surprise NYU Class", September 2011; Playbill and HuffPost, 8 September 2011; Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 10.
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).

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