'South Park' gives Chef a stirring exit
By DAVID HINCKLEY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
'South Park' is saying bye, for now, to Chef.
Isaac Hayes' Chef character got the shaft Wednesday night on Comedy Central's "South Park."
Hayes, who had voiced the R-rated character since "South Park" launched in 1997, quit the show March 13 because of what he called its insensitivity toward religious beliefs.
General speculation was that he objected to a November 2005 show called "Trapped in the Closet" that lampooned Tom Cruise and Scientology, in which Hayes is a believer.
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, conversely, worship at the church of industrial-strength animated satire, not to be confused with Shrek or Dora the Explorer.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Chef has left South Park to join the Super Adventure Club, which sounds like a harmless travel outfit, but turns out to be an association of pedophiles who say the path to spiritual immortality is cruising the world having sex with young boys.
Chef - who still has Hayes' voice, spliced together from past shows - then returns to the South Park cafeteria, where he tells Kyle, Cartman and the other young boys he wants to have sex with them, and exactly how.
The boys quickly grasp that the Chef they loved has been brainwashed by "this fruity little club." They try to deprogram him by taking him to a strip joint, which works until club members shoot him with tranquilizer darts to haul him back.
The boys spring him once more, but he's torn, and as he walks back over a bridge to the club, it catches fire and breaks.
As Chef plunges down a deep ravine, bouncing off jagged rocks, he's consumed with raging flames. He is impaled as he lands and when wild animals start ripping away his flesh, club members trying to drive them off accidentally pump a couple of bullets into him.
That's gotta hurt.
The South Parkers hold a memorial service at which they say they will remember the good Chef they loved, not the Chef brainwashed by this evil club.
Meanwhile, the club grabs his body and "repairs" it with robot parts, creating a Chef who looks and sounds like Darth Vader.
"It's been left open," said a Comedy Central spokesman, "whether the character could return. If he does, he wouldn't need Hayes' voice anymore."