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South Park character

Kenneth 'Kenny' McCormick
Age:	9
Gender:	Male
Hair color:	Blond
Job:	Student
Religion:	Roman Catholic
First appearance:	The Spirit of Christmas
Voiced by:	Matt Stone Mike Judge (one occasion)

Kenneth "Kenny" McCormick is a fictional character in the animated series South Park. Created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, he first appeared in the short films both entitled The Spirit of Christmas in 1992 and 1995. He is voiced by Matt Stone. Mike Judge provided his voice in one scene from the feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Kenny is one of four central characters in the show, all of whom are young boys growing up in the small town of South Park. The other three main characters are Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh, and Kyle Broflovski.

Kenny is most famous for dying in nearly every episode in the first five seasons of South Park. He is also easily recognizable for almost always wearing an orange parka that covers most of his face and muffles his speech.

The character was taken off the show in the fifth season episode "Kenny Dies", but returned in the following season and has since been a regular character; however, he now only dies occasionally. In most of the episodes in the 11th season, he tends to recede into the background, though this tendency seems to have ended with the 11th season finale.

Contents 1 Concept and creation 2 Characterization 2.1 Appearance and voice 2.2 Personality and impact 2.3 Background and family 2.4 Deaths 2.5 Relationships 3 References in other media 4 References 5 External links

Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (October 2007)

Early versions of the character first appeared in Parker and Stone's two pre-South Park shorts, The Spirit of Christmas (1992 and 1995). In the first Spirit of Christmas short, the character resembling Kenny is unnamed, while the character resembling Cartman is named Kenny. Both of these characters get killed in the short. In the second Spirit of Christmas, a character with both Kenny's appearance and name appears and dies.

Like the other three main characters, Kenny first appeared on the South Park television series in the first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" (1997).

Kenny almost always wears an orange hooded snorkel parka with brown gloves. Most of the time, Kenny has his hood on so that only his eyes are visible, although on some occasions when he gets frightened, he'll pull the strings of his hood over his face tighter. Underneath his hood he has messy blonde hair^[1]. He also is shown to have almost nothing on underneath his parka, as seen in the episodes "The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000", "Li'l Crime Stoppers", and "Lice Capades". In the episode "Good Times With Weapons", his anime self is shown to have blue eyes. Kenny is also shown to have blue eyes in the episode "Starvin' Marvin", in which a mutant turkey pulls out his eye and in a close-up, a blue iris is momentarily visible.

A photorealistic version of Kenny's appearance was produced as a police artist sketch for the episode "Free Willzyx".

Kenny's speech is muffled, so that it is often difficult to hear what he says (although the closed captioning sometimes verifies his lines), though his lines have become somewhat more intelligible in later episodes. Kenny speaks clearly and without his hood in "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut", "The Jeffersons", and "Lice Capades" with proper, unmuffled lines. He also cheers in "The Losing Edge" and groans in "The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000". Kenny is shown without his hood in "Lil' Crime Stoppers", "The Losing Edge", "Lice Capades", "The Jeffersons", "Super Best Friends", and "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut".

Kenny's unmuffled voice sounds like a slightly higher-pitched version of Stan's^{[citation needed]}. In the film, Kenny's voice is performed by Mike Judge, creator of "Beavis and Butt-head" and "King of the Hill". In "The Jeffersons", Kenny's unmuffled voice was performed by Matt Stone.

Kenny is the most knowledgeable of the group, and is probably the most perverted. Often when an unknown term is introduced to Stan, Kyle and Cartman, Kenny will be called upon by his friends to clarify, although sometimes Kenny does not know the meaning of the term. His muffled responses are often met with laughter or further confusion. He has a passion for breasts as shown in the episode "Lil' Crime Stoppers". His knowledge may be gleaned from his parents or from the pornography which Kenny is shown to possess in "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants". He is usually the first to perform disgusting acts (such as drinking from Jimbo's gas tank or giving Howard Stern a hummer for money). Stan and Kyle noticed this behavior in "Fat Camp" and created the "The Krazy Kenny Show" which starred Kenny doing undesirable acts for money (such as eating mice, pretending to kill newborn babies in front of their mothers, and washing his hair in battery acid) and in "Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods" he creates a haiku that goes like this:

When you rub your dick

You might find a discharge that

Winds up on the floor.

Although he is something of a silent protagonist, Kenny still seems to be very empathetic when it comes to his friends. In "Do the Handicapped Go To Hell?" he is quick to show worry about the prospect of Timmy going to Hell. Again, in "Best Friends Forever", Kenny's will states that Cartman will receive his PSP because he feels sorry for him. Kenny also alludes to his many deaths and his friends' attitude towards them in "Cherokee Hair Tampons", when he gets angry at Stan for crying over Kyle's impending death and not recognizing Kenny's at all. Kenny is ultimately revealed to be a heroic character in "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" when he saves the world by sacrificing himself. This was only one of a few sacrificial deaths that occurred throughout the show.

Kenny is also shown to be very loyal to his friends, even when he is insulted or ridiculed. In the episode "Jewbilee", Kyle betrays Kenny by ratting him out to the elders. Afterwards, Kenny ends up saving everyone by sacrificing himself. In the early seasons, Cartman consistently insults Kenny for being poor and constantly reminds him how much he hates him. Nonetheless, it is shown that he and Kenny are BFFs, since Stan and Kyle are so close.

In "The Biggest Douche in the Universe", in which Cartman is possessed by the late Kenny, Kenny is shown to be a fan of Rob Schneider. When Cartman refuses to watch Rob Schneider's films, Kenny's soul keeps trying to get him to change the channel back.

Kenny's parents are Stuart and Carol McCormick. Stuart is an alcoholic, and the family is extremely poor, probably because of this^[2]. Kenny has two siblings: Kevin McCormick, and a little girl who appeared in the episodes "Best Friends Forever" and "The List". Because Kenny's family is so poor, they eat frozen waffles with no side dishes for dinner and bread sandwiches for breakfast^[3]. In "Starvin' Marvin", Kenny won a can of green beans for his family, though they could not afford a can opener. Cartman frequently exploits Kenny’s poverty by offering him money for performing strange or dangerous tasks. In "The List", Cartman frequently mentions that his family eats Pop-Tarts for dinner. This is actually proven at the end of the episode, as Kenny and his family are all seen eating Pop-Tarts before a stray bullet kills Kenny at the dinner table.

Despite his family’s poverty, Kenny always manages to stay current with trends in toys and video games, such as maintaining a "World of Warcraft" subscription (and a computer to play it on), being the first kid to get a PSP in South Park, or buying the Chinpokomon dolls, and being the only child in the town to have a Go Go Action Bronco, a battery-powered miniature car.

Kenny McCormick is best known in the show for his recurring death in nearly every episode of the first five seasons, often followed by some variant of "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" and "You bastards!" from his friends Stan and Kyle, respectively. The gag has many precedents, going back at least as far as the regular cry, "You rotten swine! You've deaded me!" by Bluebottle voiced by Peter Sellers in "The Goon Show" in 1951. In the first few episodes, Kyle said the entire phrase. Later on, it varied, depending on who killed Kenny.

Kenny has died and come back over 102 times in the South Park franchise (79 in the series, to date, two in the early animated shorts, six in other authorized TV parodies, six times in the video game, and twice in the movie). He is also killed nine different ways in the opening sequence. Kenny’s most recent death (the first since "Best Friends Forever", two and a half years earlier) was in "The List".

Kenny died in almost all the episodes until the writers killed him off permanently in the fifth season, but he returned at the end of the next season's finale, remarking that he's "just been hanging out". By the sixth season, Matt and Trey dispensed with the practice of killing him in every episode, as they got bored with the joke. The reason why Kenny died continuously was given in an interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who stated vaguely that it was because Kenny is poor. Kenny is always resurrected for the next episode, although the explanations for his reappearance varied. One episode explained that his soul returns to his mother, takes to another body, is reborn, and then grows to be 8 or 9 years old in record time, while another simply had Kenny magically reappearing out of thin air in the second part of the two-part episode "Cartman's Mom is a Dirty Slut" after he was run over by a train in the first.

None of the other characters seem to find this at all unusual. Stan merely greeted Kenny when he materialized, and no one else even blinked. Kenny himself is sometimes aware of the fact that he is constantly killed, expressing resentment over the fact that Stan was worried about Kyle's impending death while never mourning Kenny, opting to take home economics classes over wood shop partly because he was afraid of getting killed by the dangerous power tools in the shop class, and cheering after realizing he had survived the episode "Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo".

Other characters occasionally seem to be vaguely aware of Kenny's deaths. In "Cartmanland", Kenny dies in Cartman's theme park, and when the lawyers sueing him mention "that boy who died," Cartman replies with, "Who, Kenny? He dies all the time." It would seem that the others are also aware of Kenny's deaths, but are quite nonchalant about them since they know he will re-appear. Even Stan mentioned that Kenny died all the time in the episode "Gnomes", in which the gnomes accidentally crush Kenny, and mourn over this tragedy, but are confused as to why the kids don't seem to care. In "Chef Goes Nanners", Kenny eats antacid tablets, thinking they're mints, and drinks a lot of water afterward. When Kenny explodes, the four boys and Kyle's dad laugh and applaud, and Stan even says, "That was a good one." Kenny survives a few episodes in the first five seasons:

• "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo".
• "City on the Edge of Forever", which takes place entirely within Stan's dream. Kenny only dies within the dream (and a false flashback that Cartman has in the dream).
• "Rainforest Schmainforest", when he is struck by lightning and then revived with CPR by his new girlfriend Kelly.
• The "Do the Handicapped Go to Hell?"/"Probably" two-parter, when he is run over by a bus in Part 1 and presumed dead. When the bus stops in Mexico in Part 2, he is scraped from underneath the bus by a Mexican man and found to still be alive.
• "Fat Camp", in which a kid from drug rehab who had previously been posing as Cartman is forced by Stan and Kyle to dress in Kenny's orange parka and climb into Ms. Crabtree's uterus as part of a television stunt. His dead body is later squeezed out, followed by the corpse of another kid resembling Harry Potter.
• In the fifth season episode "Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow", Earth Day activists hack all of Kenny's limbs off, but he is not shown to die at any point in the episode.

In addition to escaping death in a few episodes, Kenny does not appear in the episodes "Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus", "Cat Orgy", "Two Guys Naked in a Hot Tub", and "Pip" and therefore does not die in any of these episodes.

Kenny has died only rarely during seasons 7 through 11. Some "deaths" are not actual instances of Kenny dying, but are still accompanied by Stan and Kyle's remarks, such as when Kenny's "World of Warcraft" character was killed in "Make Love, Not Warcraft".

The episode "Cripple Fight" suggests that Kenny's deaths are caused by his parka. When Timmy gives Jimmy a nearly identical parka, a series of unfortunate and fatal events repeatedly happen behind him (meaning they all miss him); a voice can even vaguely be heard screaming, "There's Kenny! Kill him!", but Jimmy does not even notice. On the other hand, in some episodes, Kenny dies without the parka.

Cartman generally seems to tolerate Kenny, although he regards him as being lesser than him because he is poor, and can even at times be seen to treat Kenny as sort of a general laborer/servant. Cartman does appear to consider Kenny as his best friend out of the other three boys, although he is not above exaggerating the depth of their friendship in order to achieve or obtain something he wants, usually after Kenny dies or is incapacitated, such as in the episode "Best Friends Forever". In the same episode, Kenny described his general attitude toward his friendship with Cartman as his feeling sorry for him, because everyone else hates him. However, it is also shown that the two share a "best friends forever" necklace (hence the title of the episode), and in the episode "Kenny Dies", Kenny seems to agree with Cartman's assessment that the two are best friends, as Kyle and Stan are.

Kenny will go along with Cartman if he talks about something he agrees on (such as the time he giggled uncontrollably when Cartman farted in Kyle's face in "Cancelled"), or Kyle and Stan if he gets really annoyed by Cartman's attitude. On occasion, he is known to punch Cartman when Cartman rips on him for being poor.

Kenny briefly had a girlfriend named Kelly in "Rainforest Schmainforest" (she was first to admit her feelings for him), who came to his aid during one of his famous "death" scenes. In the next episode, "Spontaneous Combustion", he spends a lot of time at a new girlfriend's house but the viewer never sees her. Because Kenny had started dating Kelly in the previous episode, it is safe to assume that they are one and the same. Kelly hasn't been heard of since (although she was seen at the dance in "Hooked on Monkey Phonics", possibly having arranged to meet up with Kenny, but not being able to as he is dead at that point).

• In the book South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating, there is an article about Kenny, by Southern Illinois University philosophy professor Dr. Randall Auxier, entitled: "Killing Kenny: Our Daily Dose of Death."^[4].
• In his 2007 television special Jeff Dunham: Spark of Insanity, ventriloquist comedian Jeff Dunham and his puppet Walter remarked while looking into the camera, "This is Comedy Central! I can see Cartman. I can see Kenny. Oh, he just got killed."^{[citation needed]}
• In Episode 3 of the anime FLCL, there is a scene best seen via freeze frame in which Kenny can be seen as a car ornament impaled through the head with an arrow.^{[citation needed]}
• In the 2007 The Police reunion tour, the guitar strap used by Andy Summers features Kenny being electrocuted (the words "Oh My God! They killed Kenny!" can be read on the strap).

• List of Kenny's deaths at Wikia
• Kenny McCormick on SouthParkStudios.com
• Repository of translated Kenny-isms
• Kenny McCormick Biography ASK.com
• Kenny sings Opening Song in slow speed

v • d • e South Park characters
Main characters (The Boys)	Eric Cartman · Stan Marsh · Kyle Broflovski · Kenny McCormick
Other major characters	Butters Stotch · Chef · Mrs. Garrison
Family members	Gerald and Sheila Broflovski · Ike Broflovski · Jimbo Kern · Stuart and Carol McCormick · Liane Cartman · Randy and Sharon Marsh · Stephen and Linda Stotch · others
Recurring characters	Jesus · Saddam Hussein · Satan · Terrance and Phillip
Others	School children · Townsfolk · School staff · Families · Minor characters · Fictional species