Ah, that wasn't as much fun as I thought. Yeah, Chappelle said it clicked for him when he realized too many people were laughing AT him or what he was saying instead of WITH him and it bothered him. With SP I was thinking more specifically of how a character like Cartman ostensively exists to make fun of characters as awful as he is, but the show long, long, long ago seemingly lost track of that (if it was ever really doing it in the first place) by reveling in how he was such a fan favorite; like, the "joke" is nothing more than "Cartman is racist/anti-Semitic, etc.," and nothing else, yet he's at the same time this beloved character. Chappelle at least was usually at least flat out saying what his sketches were about in the host segments, to the point that people basically needed to ignore those or skip them to then also willfully miss the point (and even then you still had REALLY obvious buttons like, "oh, this racism is KILLING me inside!").