South Park returned for its 25th season premiere Wednesday and wasted no time skewering Matt Damon's recent commercial for Crypto.com.
In the episode "Pajama Day," the elementary school class loses its right to wear pajamas to school, which quickly escalates into a standoff between pajama-wearing residents of South Park and their non-pajama-wearing neighbors.
As the class tries to find a solution, they repeatedly riff on the tagline from Damon's recent—and widely mocked—commercial for cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com: "Fortune favors the brave."
"What does Matt Damon say in the Bitcoin commercial? Fortune favors the brave!" Cartman exhorts the class. His classmate Clyde replies, "My dad said he listened to Matt Damon and lost all his money."
The running gag plays out throughout the episode, until one character says, "Alright dude, can we lay off the Matt Damon jokes please, they're just getting old."
Matt Damon's Crypto.com ad
Damon's Crypto.com ad sees the Oscar-nominated actor striding around a futuristic room while comparing crypto investors to pioneers like the Wright brothers and astronauts.
It was recently pilloried on social media, with Guardian writer Carole Cadwalladr tweeting, "There isn’t enough yuck in the world to describe Matt Damon advertising a Ponzi scheme."
It's not the first time that South Park has taken aim at cryptocurrency; last year, an episode set in the near future featured a motel clerk declaring that "it’s the future—we’ve all decided centralized banking is rigged, so we trust more in fly-by-night Ponzi schemes," while displaying a "Bitcoin only" sign on their reception desk.
It's also not the first go-around that Damon has had with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In their 2004 film Team America: World Police, Damon is depicted as a puppet who can only say his name; a line that fans still yell at the actor.
"If I'm near a college town, I'll get 'Maaatt Daaaamon' from Team America," Damon told Absolute Radio.
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