After a somewhat shaky twelfth season, the South Park boys we know and love are back and in rare form for the thirteenth season.  And the crew out at Comedy Central sent me a copy of the thirteenth season to write up.

And indeed, this season is actually quite a bit better than the last.

We return to South Park for a whole lot of interesting stories–Kenny’s brush with purity and decency courtesy of the Jonas Brothers and Big Disney, Cartman’s foray into superherodom as The Coon, Stan’s brush with Big Money and bizarre government policymaking, Kyle’s ghost hunting, Somalian pirates, and water parks with dubious water content.

The South Park video line, for those who haven’t already seen a box set of season episodes or the videos on southparkstudios.com, has one advantage over the broadcast episodes–a complete lack of content editing.  Yes, every single obscenity normally found in a South Park episode is restored to its full and unfettered glory.  And moreover, Kenny’s lines, which are generally muffled and unintelligible in broadcast, get closed captioning on the DVD, which adds a whole new level of smutty joy to the proceedings.

South Park’s greatest strength has always lied in making the irrational completely insane.  Where we all look at Washington’s response to the bailout question and think, this is sheer lunacy, South Park takes it and makes it ACTUAL lunacy.  Sometimes the kids are just witnesses to the lunacy, merely swept along in the roiling tides of insanity, and sometimes–in the case of Cartman’s adventure with the Somalian pirates–they’re the direct cause.

But one thing is clear: this may not be South Park’s best season–that particular issue will be up for debate literally until the earth crashes into the sun–but it’s a good one, filled with plenty of laughs and lots of surprises.  Even if you’ve already seen the episodes on television, the DVD will still be a new experience.

The Screenhead Ten Scale knows a value when it sees one and hands the wild, raunchy, hilarious antics of South Park’s lucky thirteenth an eight out of ten for bringing comedy and value to the masses.