They Killed Kenny Again / South Park

Oh my God, these bastards killed Kenny again! ^note From Left to Right, Top to Bottom: Blasted by UFO then ran over by a herd of cattle and a police car, Crushed by the MIR Space Station (he dies again twice in the same episode), Electrocuted when trying to turning on a hospital generator, Head bitten off by Ozzy Osbourne, Sliced in half by a boomerang, Fell into a pit of lava (while trying to save the boys' Gamesphere), Accidentally shot at the back of the head from a bullet flying through the window, Tossed and eaten by a reptilian bird, out of nowhere.

Stan: "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!"
Kyle: "You bastards!"

— Almost every episode in the first five seasons of South Park.

Kenny McCormick is the Trope Namer and best-known example. During the first five seasons, Kenny would die practically Once an Episode, and Stan and Kyle would always give their trope-naming exchange. The showrunners were pretty creative about it, knowing how quickly it could become an Overused Running Gag.

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• First, they came up with a truly remarkable variety of ways to kill Kenny. There's even a pie-chart on the main page for this trope as the page image — and it's accurate! The writers were especially good at subversions, having Kenny improbably survive the episode's threat and then die in a completely unrelated and unexpected way just minutes later. Among the creative things they did was have him die in a Halloween Episode, then come back as a zombie, then get killed again. They also once gave Kenny a break by having his girlfriend rush in and save him with CPR.
• Second, they hung a tremendous number of lampshades on it.
  • In "Cartmanland":
  Attorney: There's also the lawsuit of the little boy who died in your park. The family is entitled to the rest of this (Cartman's money).
  Cartman: What, Kenny?! He dies all the time!
  • In "Cherokee Hair Tampons":
  Stan: (voice cracking) There's nothing more I can do, Kenny. I've tried everything to save Kyle. Holistic medicine is gonna kill my friend!
  Kenny: (muffled) You never seem to care when I die!
  • In "Cartman's Silly Hate Crime 2000", Stan and Kyle themselves are accidentally responsible for Kenny's death, and react accordingly:
  Stan: (completely deadpan) Oh my God, we killed Kenny.
  Kyle: We killed Kenny?
  Stan: (still deadpan) We killed Kenny. We're bastards.
  • Kenny himself has been given the opportunity to paraphrase both parts of the quote that surrounds his usual demise.
  Oh my god, we killed Cartman!
  You bastard!
  • Invoked, Lampshaded, and Subverted all at once. In "Cripple Fight" Timmy plots to get Jimmy, another crippled kid, killed. He does this by giving Jimmy one of or a coat that looks just like Kenny's. Jimmy walks away and proceeds to very narrowly avoid death from various sources the entire way.
  • In South Park: The Stick of Truth, Kenny is now "Princess Kenny". If he dies in combat, he'll be picked apart by rats and dragged off, so he cannot be revived. He returns either after two turns or after combat ends. He also exhibits this after he betrays the group and becomes the Final Boss — and a Sequential Boss who comes back every time you kill him, although weaker than before. The New Kid finally breaks a taboo by farting on his balls and defeats him — and he still comes back, but he's no longer evil.
  • In South Park: The Fractured but Whole, Kenny is now Mysterion, and dying and coming back is a part of his gameplay. Whenever he dies, he becomes "Dead Mysterion", a floating spectre with a different moveset from regular Mysterion. Dead Mysterion cannot be damaged, but you still lose the fight if he's the only one left. He can return to life with his Limit Break, which consists of his soul rising to Heaven — only for him to change his mind at the last second and revive as regular Mysterion (which also heals the rest of the team).
• Third, they eventually stopped doing the gag entirely. The Season 5 episode "Kenny Dies" is a Very Special Episode in which Kenny gets Killed Off for Real. His place in the Four-Temperament Ensemble was filled mostly by Tweek or Butters, depending on the day. Then after one season, they brought Kenny back, with no explanation (although Word of God hinted it had something to do with Jesus dying in that episode). Trey and Matt mentioned that they were originally planning to kill off Kyle at the end of season 5, but decided against it and had Kenny bite the dust for real as a way of retiring the gag before it got stale. Now Kenny no longer dies... as often. Usually, they play with the audience's expectation that Kenny will die, and it actually makes for some tension in situations where the audience would otherwise expect a character to survive.
  • In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Kenny dies for real, and he goes to Hell, but he gets resurrected when the forces of Hell invade Earth. Then Kenny sacrifices himself so that there could be no Hell on Earth, which earns him a place in Heaven.
  • In "Poor and Stupid", Kenny finds himself on an active NASCAR track, and manages not to get killed — even as the cars around him are all ramming each other and causing accident after accident.
• Fourth, the Mysterion episodes actually explained Kenny's immortality as an ability of his: he was born with a form of Born-Again Immortality that causes his mother, every time he dies, to give birth to an infant who ages into Kenny overnight. (This is possible because his parents attended cult meetings when his mother was pregnant with him the first time.) The effect of this erases everyone's memory of each death but Kenny's — although his friends and parents kinda remember him dying a lot, but his parents tend to ignore it thanks to their perpetual substance abuse-induced haze.
• And characters other than Kenny have been subject to this as well:
  • In "Probably", Satan gets caught in a Love Triangle with Saddam Hussein and some random dude, who constantly kill each other for Satan's hand. However, they're already dead and in Hell, so they just show up again with the next batch of damned souls. Averted in a later episode when he gets killed by Manbearpig and goes to Heaven. He makes no apperances after that.
  Saddam: Where was I supposed to go, Detroit?
  • Osama bin Laden has been killed twice on the show — three times if you include his Real Life death as occurring In-Universe.
  • Cartman seems to be capable of this, although not to Kenny's extent. For instance, in "Medicinal Fried Chicken", his head explodes, but he's fine the next time we see him. The prototype versions of both him and Kenny also die in the 1992 Spirit of Christmas short.^note In the short, the Cartman prototype was named Kenny instead, while the Kenny prototype himself as unnamed.
  • Jesus has died three times, the first time by an Iraqi, the second time by Kyle (whom was instructed by Jesus to kill him so he could resurrect outside their prison cell), and the third time by Al Gore, who was trying to kill ManBearPig, but ended up killing everyone in Imaginationland, except Butters, who imagines everyone back to life.

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