Original air date: 10/31/2012
A scandal in South Park causes everyone to cut their bracelets and renounce faith in God; after Stan continues to hold faith, his cause spawns a new bracelet and lots of attention.
A Scause For Applause contains examples of:
- Aesop Amnesia: The townspeople bar Stan seemed to have forgotten that they should be focusing on what Jesus lived for, not what he died for. Interestingly, Stan was the one who had delivered the Aesop in the latter episode.
- An Aesop: Don't let the character of someone promoting a message overshadow the message itself and beware those trying to turn support of a cause into a commodity to sell you.
- Art Shift: The poem about scauses is illustrated in the visual style of Dr. Seuss.
- Broken Pedestal: Everyone towards Jesus and eventually Stan.
- Easily Condemned: While it was wrong for Jesus to lie about his steroid use, everyone seems to completely forget all that Jesus did like his miracles performed, sacrificing his own life to be forgiven for our sins, and starting the biggest religion in the world.
- Holier Than Thou: The townspeople hold this attitude when they wear their scauses.
- Hypocrite:
- Christianity has a huge focus on forgiveness, though all the Christians refuse to forgive Jesus for not feeling pain when he died (even though he still died so they can be forgiven nonetheless) and renounce faith in him entirely.
- Jesus, as in "Turn the other cheek" Jesus, ignores the factory owner when he begs for mercy.
- Laser-Guided Karma: P.F. Pityef Bracelet Factory is destroyed in the end.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The whole episode satirizes the Lance Armstrong doping scandal.
- Serious Business: The fact that Stan was still wearing a bracelet when everyone else had them cut off is treated as such a big new story, he ends up becoming a national icon, both by people who think that doing so is a "disservice to society" and people who think that he should be praised for not conforming to everyone else.
- Shout-Out: The story of how the scause is made is directly out of a Dr. Seuss story.
- For added points, the second half of the episode is homage to The Sneetches.
- Spoof Aesop: Just wearing a bracelet isn't a substitute for social activism. T-shirts are.
- Take That!:
- The townspeople are one aimed towards the ideas of slacktivism and virtue signaling. They come across as Holier Than Thou, and think that just wearing a bracelet is all they need to do to stand up for a cause.
- Mainstream News gets a slap to the face when Stan is brought onto a public new-station to be used as a target by people who conflate something as minor as wearing a scause bracelet to willfully advocating historical atrocities, with a retarded fish being used as the only advocate in Stans favor. The fact that it winds up turning Stan into a real activist driven by narcissism only drives the nail in further.
