South Park renames itself to mock a move Apple and Google already made real.

…(cont) Ontario didn't wait on either app. On August 29th, Premier Doug Ford put up a large sign reading "Lake Ontario" and left it standing. It's not much of a rebuttal to an executive order, except that a sign doesn't take software updates. That's the whole appeal of a road sign in a fight like this one.

By September 1st, the same week Apple fell in line, a Reuters/Ipsos poll had the count: 63 percent of Americans opposed the renaming. A majority said no in the same stretch of days two of the country's biggest tech companies said yes. The order didn't need the public's permission. It needed the map's, and the map said yes twice, at two different speeds.

Which is what makes South Park's move this week almost redundant. Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced the show will rename itself "South America," crediting the "bravery and patriotism" of Apple and Google for the inspiration. It lands as satire because it's staged as one — a title card, a press line, a joke everyone's in on. But strip the delivery and it's the same act Google performed on a Saturday without one: change the name because the change came from above. The cartoon needed a punchline to do what the map did as routine maintenance.

Line up the dates — the order, the map, the sign, the poll, the cartoon — and only one of them was trying to be funny.