Mr. Garrison


Mr. Herbert Garrison is a fictional character and occasional antagonist featured in the American animated television series South Park, created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Garrison first appeared in South Parks pilot episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", which aired on August 13, 1997.
Garrison is primarily employed as a teacher at South Park Elementary, originally of the main characters' third grade class, and currently, their fourth-grade class. In the earlier seasons, Garrison uses a hand puppet named Mr. Hat as a teaching resource; the puppet occasionally shows signs of sentience and has been suggested to be a manifestation of Garrison's own latent homosexual feelings. Mr. Hat was largely retired by the sixth season. Garrison was partially inspired by Parker's kindergarten teacher, who also used a puppet named Mr. Hat, as well as a British literature professor Parker had at the University of Colorado. Garrison is characterized as particularly cynical, especially in comparison with the other adults in South Park, and he is one of the few characters on South Park to have broken the fourth wall.
In the ninth season premiere, "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina", Garrison comes out as a trans woman, undergoes a sex change operation and renames herself Janet Garrison. In the twelfth season episode "Eek, a Penis!" a disillusioned Garrison undergoes another sex change operation to detransition. During the twentieth season, Garrison is elected as the 45th president of the United States, being a parody of Donald Trump's first term, and serves in the role until the twenty-fourth season. He is never referred to by name during this period, and is exclusively referred to as "the President". For Trump's second term starting in the twenty-seventh season, rather than using Garrison as a Trump parody again, Donald Trump himself is depicted taking reference from an earlier depiction of Saddam Hussein.
Parker has stated that Garrison has become one of the most complex characters on South Park, particularly due to his relationship with Mr. Hat and his sexuality and gender issues. He describes Garrison as "the soap opera element to the whole series. has a real story going on."

Role in ''South Park''

In South Park, Garrison was raised in Arkansas and claims to have a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Denver Community College, as depicted in "The Entity". Garrison is characterized as being sexually confused, having had both heterosexual and same-sex relationships in addition to two sex reassignment surgeries.
In many episodes, Garrison displays racist tendencies. In the episode "Chef Goes Nanners", Garrison's hand puppet, Mr. Hat, is a member of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which Garrison resents, and he insists to Chef that he wants nothing to do with it. However, in the later episode "Here Comes the Neighborhood", he leads an effort to run affluent residents–who are all Black–out of town using Klan techniques, including burning crosses. Although the townsfolk at first claim that this is because of the "richers'" wealth, in his last line of the episode, Garrison's intentions are revealed to be indeed racially motivated. In the episode "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig", he states that "genetic engineering erases all of God's mistakes, like German people". In multiple episodes, he expresses disdain for Mexican people, to the point of attempting to prolong the COVID-19 pandemic in order to keep his campaign promise to eradicate Mexicans, even if countless other people also died.
In the first three seasons, Garrison teaches the third–grade class at South Park Elementary School. He was portrayed as a closeted homosexual, of which he was ashamed. He pretends to have highly negative views on homosexuality in earlier episodes. Garrison usually uses a hand puppet named Mr. Hat, which he uses to emote more aggressively as well as to display his internal conflicts. It was suggested that Mr. Hat, and his temporary replacement Mr. Twig, were characters through which Garrison could express his repressed gay feelings. Though Garrison emphatically denies being gay, he acknowledges that Mr. Hat and Mr. Twig had homosexual fantasies. He eventually comes out as gay in the episode "4th Grade".
It has been established that Garrison has had heterosexual relationships, including with Liane Cartman. Possible same-sex relationships include Stephen Stotch in "Butters' Very Own Episode", and he sought a tryst with Eric Cartman in "Cartman Joins NAMBLA", in which Garrison solicited sex from Cartman, not knowing that he had contacted the latter online; Garrison was consequently arrested for this act and then temporarily dismissed from his teaching position. In his absence from teaching, Garrison wrote an erotic romance novel titled In the Valley of Penises, which sold respectably before it won the Gay Pulitzer Prize and was deemed to be "the best work of homoerotic literature since Huckleberry Finn".
In the episodes following the release of his novel, Garrison has a nervous breakdown and flees South Park to become a hermit, where he eventually comes to terms with his gay identity. After this point, he is portrayed as openly embracing his homosexuality.
He is rehired by South Park Elementary as a kindergarten teacher, as his previous position as the fourth grade teacher was held by Diane Choksondik. In the sixth season episode "The Death Camp of Tolerance", he was promoted to the fourth grade following Choksondik's death. However, when Garrison finds that he could sue the school for substantial compensation if he were discriminated against, he purposely attempts to be dismissed. To that end, he abandons his puppet counterpart in favor of a human assistant, Mr. Slave, Garrison's personal BDSM slave and lover. The two proceed to perform several sexually explicit homosexual acts in front of Garrison's students. Garrison's plan was unsuccessful, and he was instead praised for his perceived bravery.
The show has implied that Garrison has corprophilic tendencies in "Proper Condom Use", wherein the majority of sexual acts he taught to the kindergarten class involved feces or defecation. In that episode, Chef refers to Garrison as a "complete pervert".
Despite having declared himself gay, Garrison continues to appear ashamed of it as a part of his continual emotional and psychological problems. In the season three finale, "World Wide Recorder Concert", he was portrayed as in despair over the fact that his father, Garrison Senior, had not sexually abused him when Garrison was young, believing that he did not love his son. After being repeatedly pressed by his son to have sex with him, Garrison Senior has Kenny G do so. In two episodes–"An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig" and "Jakovasaurs"–Garrison was implied to have practiced bestiality with Cartman's pig and a pigeon, respectively.
Garrison is characterized as highly inept as a teacher, regularly introducing dubious curricula, such as showing Barnaby Jones videos to the class for eight days, asking the class "why Chubby Checker left the Beatles in 1972" or teaching the students how to tell the difference between a prostitute and a police officer. On the other hand, he will occasionally teach the children advanced subjects such as theories on evolution, Stalin, and communism. Despite his cynicism, he appears to genuinely enjoy his job, falling into a depression when he is fired or is suspended from teaching. He also carries a gun and badge with him in class at all times, despite being told the teachers do not carry guns.
Garrison did not have a known given name until the episode "Cherokee Hair Tampons". In that episode, his full name is Ethan P. Garrison. In "The Entity", his given name is changed to Herbert. During Garrison's presidency, he is generally not referred to by name at all, with characters only referring to him as "The President".

As Janet Garrison

In the season nine premiere, "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina", Garrison comes out as a trans woman and decides to undergo a vaginoplasty and breast augmentation. In the episode "D-Yikes!", it is revealed that she renamed herself Janet. Garrison frequently asserts her femininity, including through misandry and open proclamations of her sexuality.
The transition causes her relationship with Mr. Slave to end, as the latter had not been consulted before the operation. Garrison also realizes that she has had no menstrual periods after the operation, leading her to believe that she is pregnant. Garrison attempts to abort before she is told that her procedure does not result in the creation of reproductive organs. In the episode "Follow That Egg!", she attempts to prevent same-sex marriage from becoming legal after finding out that Mr. Slave is engaged to Big Gay Al.
In the episode "Go God Go", Garrison is ordered by the school district to teach evolution. Due to her personal aversion to the concept, she deliberately underperforms and is subsequently replaced by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins becomes attracted to Garrison, and they begin dating. Dawkins converts Garrison to atheism, and they subsequently decide to eradicate all religion from the world, leading to a future where the global populace embraces atheism and ignores logic, causing wars about the answer to "the Great Question". In the following episode, "Go God Go XII", Eric Cartman, having been cryonically frozen 500 years earlier, contacts Garrison's home from the future. Dawkins answers the phone and learns from Cartman about Garrison's previous life. Repulsed, Dawkins hastily ends his relationship with Garrison. The episode reveals that Garrison was the motivation that convinced Dawkins to teach atheism to the world, and as their relationship ended, the future changed once more.
In the episode "D-Yikes", Mrs. Garrison starts to have lesbian relationships. After an unnamed boyfriend abandons her, Garrison meets Allison, a lesbian who becomes quickly attracted to the former. Unaware of Allison's sexual orientation or growing affection, Garrison unwittingly joins her at a lesbian bar. After Garrison learns the truth, she is initially shocked but quickly returns Allison's feelings, and the two begin to date. As a result, Garrison begins openly identifying as a lesbian.