Kenneth "Kenny" McCormick is a fictional character and one of the four main protagonists in the adult animated sitcom South Park, alongside Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Eric Cartman. His often muffled and incomprehensible speech—the result of his parka hood covering his mouth—is provided by co-creator Matt Stone. After early appearances in The Spirit of Christmas shorts in 1992 and 1995, Kenny appeared in South Park television episodes beginning August 13, 1997, as well as the 1999 feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, where his uncovered face and voice were first revealed.
Kenny is a third- and later fourth-grade student who commonly has extraordinary experiences atypical of conventional small-town life in his hometown of South Park, Colorado, where he lives with his poverty-stricken family. Kenny is animated by computer to look as he did in the show's original method of cutout animation.
The character gained popularity from a running gag during the first five seasons of the series, whereby Kenny would suffer an excruciating death before returning alive and well in the next episode with little or no explanation. Stan would frequently use the catchphrase "Oh, my god! They killed Kenny!", followed by Kyle exclaiming, "You bastard(s)!". Since the sixth season in 2002, the practice of killing Kenny has been seldom used by the show's creators. Various episodes have set up the gag, sometimes presenting alternate explanations for Kenny's unacknowledged reappearances.
Role in South Park
Kenny attends South Park Elementary as part of Mr. Garrison's fourth-grade class. During the first 58 episodes, Kenny and the other main child characters were in the third grade. Kenny comes from a poor, dysfunctional household, presided over by his alcoholic, unemployed father, Stuart McCormick. His mother Carol McCormick has a job washing dishes at Olive Garden. Kenny has an older brother named Kevin. He also has a younger sister who is shown with his family in the season nine episode "Best Friends Forever", but does not reappear until the 15th season episode "The Poor Kid", where her name is revealed to be Karen, whom he loves unconditionally. Kenny is friends with Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Leopold "Butters" Stotch. Kenny is regularly teased for living in poverty, particularly by Cartman.
The character gained popularity from a running gag during the first five seasons of the series, whereby Kenny would suffer an excruciating and gruesome yet comical death before returning alive and well in the next with little or no explanation. Stan would frequently use the catchphrase "Oh my god! They killed Kenny!", followed by Kyle exclaiming "You bastard(s)!". Since the sixth season in 2002, the practice of killing Kenny has been seldom used by the show's creators. Various episodes have set up the gag, sometimes presenting alternate explanations for Kenny's unacknowledged reappearances.
Kenny's superhero alter ego, Mysterion, first appeared in the season 13 episode "The Coon", as a rival to Eric Cartman's eponymous supervillain alter ego. He unmasks himself at the end of the episode, but his identity is left intentionally ambiguous to the viewer. He is not revealed to be Kenny until his third appearance, in the season 14 episode "Mysterion Rises".
Deaths
Prior to season six, Kenny died in almost every episode. The nature of the deaths were often gruesome and portrayed in a comically absurd fashion, and usually followed by Stan Marsh or Kyle Broflovski yelling "Oh, my God! They killed Kenny!" with the other yelling "You bastard(s)!" Shortly afterward, rats would commonly appear and pick at his corpse. In a following episode, Kenny would reappear alive and well, usually without any explanation. Most characters appear oblivious or indifferent to the phenomenon, although occasionally one will acknowledge awareness of it. In "Cherokee Hair Tampons", Kenny gets irritated and offended when Stan laments Kyle's critical condition while utterly ignoring Kenny's past demises. Eric Cartman commented on Kenny's deaths in the episode "Cartmanland" when he is being sued for unsafe rides insisting to attorneys representing his family that "Kenny? He dies all the time!" In "Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo", as the episode is about to end, the kids point out that "something feels unfinished", Kenny frets that he will die again, but the text "The End" appears upon the screen and Kenny celebrates, relieved; it is the first episode in the series he survives.
Near the end of the production run of the show's fifth season, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone contemplated having an episode in which Kenny was killed off permanently. The reasoning behind the idea was to genuinely surprise fans, and to allow an opportunity to provide a major role for Butters Stotch, a breakout character whose popularity was growing with the viewers and creators of the show. In the episode "Kenny Dies", Kenny dies after developing terminal muscular dystrophy, while Parker and Stone claimed that Kenny would not be returning in subsequent episodes. The duo insisted they grew tired of upholding the tradition of having Kenny die in each episode. Stone stated that thinking of humorous ways to kill the character was initially fun, but became more mundane as the series progressed.