Who Is the Main Character in ‘South Park’? Is It Cartman, Kenny, Kyle, or Stan?

South Park has been around since 1997, and it’s not going away any time soon. It’s one of the most popular animated series of all time and one of the best comedy shows ever created. They are crude, sometimes dark, and make jokes just about anything and anyone. But, despite 26 seasons of action (so far), fans are still wondering – who’s actually the main character in South Park?

There are actually four main characters in South Park – Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Kenny McCormick. However, if you had to pick one as the main character, it’d be either Stan – as most storylines revolve around him or his family, or Cartman – as he’s by far the most popular character.

Eric Cartman was actually envisioned as sort of an antagonist among the crew, and although he is just that most of the time, fans just absolutely love the humor behind the character. Be that as it may, it’s hard to characterize anyone from South Park as a single main character, but we’ll try to go deep and do just that.

South Park characters’ breakdown

Stan Marsh

Stan Marsh is a character that’s voiced and loosely based on one of the show’s co-creators, Trey Parker. One could argue that Stan is the most ‘normal’ kid – and person – in South Park, although nothing about his life is normal. His best friend is Kyle Broflovski, a character voiced and loosely based on the other co-creator, Matt Stone.

Stan wears a recognizable red and blue hat and a brown coat, often serving as a moral vertical for the show. He or his family are the center protagonists of most Soth Park episodes out of any other character from the main four. Stan’s father, Randy, is widely considered the main character among South Park’s adults.

Kyle Broflovski

Kyle Broflovski, as we mentioned, is voiced and loosely based on the other South Park co-creator, Matt Stone. He’s Stan’s best friend and is often depicted as the most morally sound (apart from Stan, at times) and intelligent character from the main group.

Kyle is also one of the few Jewish kids in South Park, often making him feel like an outcast. He often battles moral dilemmas and gets frustrated quite easily. Eric Cartman is a part of his group of friends, but one could argue that they are actually enemies since Cartman always teases and sometimes bullies Kyle for being Jewish.

Kyle has a green ear-flap hat with an orange jacket and curly red hair underneath the hat.

Eric Cartman

Eric Cartman, just like Stan, is voiced by Trey Parker. He’s often portrayed as the antagonist of the group, being a big, fat, super-spoiled kid that mocks and teases everyone around him. Cartman is misogynistic, lazy, insensitive, sometimes racist, homophobic, and most of all, anti-semitic, as he often teases Kyle Broflovski just because he’s Jewish.

Cartman always plots some wicked schemes that usually lead to consequences for him, as other characters prove smarter than him. Although he’s an antagonist most of the time, Cartman is sometimes portrayed as an antihero or even a protagonist, but those instances are quite rare.

You’ll recognize Cartman as the fattest kid of the bunch, donning a red coat with a light blue and yellow hat. He’s likely the most popular and most recognizable South Park character making many fans pick him when asked who they believe was the real main character of the show.

Kenny McCormick

Kenny is the final part of the core group, and he’s most recognizable for the orange hoodie covering most of his face, which is why his speech is muffled and often indistinguishable. The character is voiced by Matt Stone, meaning both co-creators are voicing two characters from the core group.

Kenny is living in poverty, which is why he’s often made fun of by Cartman. Despite that, he might be Cartman’s best friend, although he’s also close with Stan and Kyle. Until Season Six, Kenny died in almost every show episode in gruesome, absurd, and often hilarious ways.

Later, it was established that he canonically can resurrect after dying, but only he remembers his actual death afterward, despite his friends bearing witness almost every time.

Butters Scotch

Although Butters isn’t considered one of the core group members, he is the closest character to that. He actually sort of took Kenny’s role throughout Season Six while the creators thought about not bringing Kenny back to life.

Butters goes to the same class as the core four and is depicted as a sweet, innocent, naive guy who often gets manipulated into trouble by Cartman. However, he gets super anxious whenever he gets into trouble due to being afraid of his parents’ punishment. Butters wears a light-blue shirt and has blonde hair.

Randy Marsh

Randy Marsh is Stan’s father and is usually considered to be the main adult character in the show. He is a silly, middle-class married father with two children who slowly grow to become one of the most featured characters in the show as the series progresses.

He’s kind of dumb and always get’s into stupid schemes that fall flat on his face. In this one episode, he figured out he could smoke medical marijuana if he had cancer, so he deliberately gave himself testicular cancer. His balls grew so big that he could bounce around on them or carry them in a wheelbarrow.

You’ll recognize Randy for his black hair, thick black mustache, a light blue-green (indigo, I guess?) shirt, and brown pants.

Other South Park characters

The six characters I’ve mentioned above are certainly the most featured in the show, but they are far from the only ones. Other highly important characters include Mr. Garrison – the boys’ fourth-grade teacher; Mr. Mackey – the school’s principal who always says ‘M’Kay?’ at the end of each sentence; and Chef, the school’s African-American chef.

There are Kyle’s parents, Gerald and Sheila Broflovski; Cartman’s mother, Liane; Jimmy and Timmy – two disabled boys from the boys’ class; Tolkien – their African-American friend; Wendy – Stan’s on-and-off-again girlfriend; Towelie – a towel addicted to recreational drugs, and so, so many others, like Jesus, the Devil, etc.

The main character in South Park

So, now that we established what South Park is about and who all the heavily-featured characters are – who is the show’s main character?

Well, it’s hard to say there’s only one. The four boys – Stan, Cartman, Kyle, and Kenny, are all considered the main characters, or the core four. However, if you have to single out one, you could go two different ways.

The first route is picking Stan Marsh as the main character. Stan is the main protagonist of most of the episodes in the show – and the Marsh family adds even more. That doesn’t mean other characters don’t take center stage, but Stan and his family do so the most frequently. Ergo, you could argue that Stan is the series’s main character.

That being said, the other route to take is picking Eric Cartman as the main character. He was envisioned as an antagonist right from the start, but the character grew so popular throughout the series that he became South Park’s face.

Over the years, he started taking more of a center stage in many episodes, and if you consider popularity among fans – he’s by far the show’s most important character. Hence, you could pick Cartman as South Park’s main character.

That opens up the question of whether an antagonist can actually be a main character. Still, seeing how popular Cartman is and how many episodes he took center stage in, you wouldn’t be wrong to pick him over Stan.