After a brutal Episode, South Park uses Kristi Noem’s face gag as a new profile photo

South Park has extended one of its harshest gags from Season 27 into real life by making it the face of the show’s official social media accounts. In the second episode of the season, Got a Nut, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is portrayed with an exaggerated running joke — her face repeatedly detaches and has to be reassembled by a pit crew of surgeons.

This visual jab followed another brutal layer of satire in which Noem is depicted as impulsively shooting any dog she encounters, a direct reference to her own admission in her 2024 memoir No Going Back.

After the episode aired, Noem publicly called the depiction misogynistic and petty. In response, South Park’s Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X accounts changed their profile pictures to an unflattering screenshot from the episode. It shows Noem’s drooping animated face mid-detachment. The move makes the show’s stance clear — they’re doubling down rather than backing off.

South Park turns Kristi Noem’s face gag into official social media branding

The decision to swap all of South Park’s official profile photos with a warped image of Kristi Noem’s animated face was not subtle. The shot comes from Got a Nut, where her cartoon counterpart’s skin literally slips off her skull during scenes, forcing a team of medical staff to snap it back in place.

On Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X, that specific still — with her jaw sagging and eyes uneven — replaced the usual South Park logo. The change happened directly after Noem’s public criticism, where she accused the show of targeting her gender instead of her work.

The episode’s depiction of Noem was already extreme by South Park standards. Beyond the face gag, she was shown firing at dogs without hesitation, a nod to the real incident she recounted in her memoir.

Her role in the storyline put her alongside Mr. Mackey, who joins ICE after losing his school counselor job, linking her character to aggressive immigration enforcement.

By making the screenshot their public image, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone pushed the parody into an ongoing joke outside the episode. It signaled that rather than tone down the satire in response to backlash, they intended to let the gag live on every time someone visits the show’s social platforms.

The move also connects to how South Park has handled political figures this season. In Sermon on the ‘Mount, Donald Trump was paired with Satan in a romantic subplot, drawing its own wave of outrage. In Got a Nut, JD Vance appears with a shrunken animated body and altered voice to sound bumbling.

These portrayals haven’t been left to air and disappear. They’ve been amplified through clips, stills, and now, profile pictures that keep the imagery circulating beyond the broadcast.

The Noem face image especially stands out because it replaces standard branding with something intentionally unflattering. Profile photos are often the first thing viewers see when searching for the show or scrolling a feed. By locking in that shot, the show essentially turned her most humiliating animated moment into a promotional banner.

It’s an unusually aggressive social media tactic for a TV series but it fits the show’s long-standing approach. Once they commit to a joke, they don’t retreat when the subject complains. This time, they made sure the punchline follows Noem everywhere online.

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