The One Thing You Didn't Know About 'South Park'

South Park has been on air for 19 (going on 20) seasons and 19 years, which, in TV years, is basically forever. So despite Trey Parker and Matt Stone's attempts to portray themselves as lucky goofballs who keep magically striking on the formula for entertainment success, I don't buy it. These guys are storytelling geniuses with a ton of stamina. And if you're wondering how you can learn to become as good as they are at crafting a 19 year-long story, go no further. During San Diego Comic-Con, Parker and Stone revealed one fact that even hardcore South Park fans might not know — and apparently, we've got Parker's passion for Dungeons & Dragons to thank for some of the most enduring characters on the small screen.

Yep, we learnt that Parker enjoyed and continues to enjoy the game of Dungeons & Dragons, and that a lot of South Park's genius is thanks to that. According to Entertainment Weekly, Parker claimed during Comic-Con that the game honed his storytelling abilities, which became so useful to him later in life. And obviously, right? Obviously. Now that Parker's said it, it makes so. Much. Sense. Like South Park, Dungeons & Dragons is really long and has a huge cast of characters.

Parker confirmed that he's keeping his storytelling game sharp by playing Dungeons & Dragons even now. And he's not the only one: At Comic-Con, he revealed he played two months ago with noted superhuman Elon Musk (who's behind Tesla Motors, but also co-founded Paypal, SolarCity, OpenAl and Zip2):

That was really fun and the best part of it was, I was like, ‘We shouldn’t spend a lot of time doing character creation because we were going to start at level 1, and… I was just emailing him and I was like, ‘If you just want to tell me what race and class you want to be, I’ll do the sheets so we can just get to playing and maybe 20 seconds later an email came back: ‘Human Paladin.’

If this isn't proof enough that we all need to move on from the stigmatization of Dungeons & Dragons as the ultimate nerd game, I don't know what will. We're not in high school anymore, and that whole dividing the world into nerds/popular kids thing is so boringly Mean Girls. If two humans as dynamic and creative as Musk and Parker are are into it, it's got to be good for stimulating your intellect. So, if you have some extra time this summer and you're ready to engage in the wild world of character sheets and a 20 sided die, you should check out Dungeons & Dragons. Your 20 season-long TV series will thank you for it later.

Images: Comedy Central (2)