Peter Ser­afi­now­icz and the South Park team are deep­fak­ing an entire film

The ​“deep­fake”, an unset­tling new tech­nol­o­gy allow­ing video of one person’s face to be super­im­posed onto video of some­one else’s head, has been used for such nefar­i­ous pur­pos­es as celebri­ty pornog­ra­phy and pro­pa­gan­diz­ing polit­i­cal mis­in­for­ma­tion. But these fear­some pow­ers may also be used for good – the high­est good, in fact, by which we of course mean comedy.

The come­di­an Peter Ser­afi­now­icz has been enter­tain­ing the online mass­es since 2017 with his series of Trump lip-dub clips, in which he re-voic­es snip­pets of the Com­man­der-in-Chief word for word, with vary­ing new tones. He did Cock­ney Trump and Sophis­ti­cat­ed Trump, but struck a par­tic­u­lar chord with Sassy Trump, who has got­ten a sec­ond life in a new short upping the ante of fakery.

Ser­afi­now­icz has joined forces with South Park cre­ators Trey Park­er and Matt Stone for a four­teen-minute episode of Sassy Jus­tice, the Cheyenne, Wyoming local access show led by lisp­ing local jour­nal­ist Fred Sassy as he gets to the bot­tom of the truth about var­i­ous things. This time around, the lip-dub tech­nique has been upgrad­ed to the deep­fake; Ser­afi­now­icz voic­es Sassy (who has the face of Trump, with a cheap wig in slight­ly bet­ter taste than his actu­al hair) and Trump him­self, along with Michael Caine.

Park­er and Stone con­tribute a host of oth­er voic­es, such as a dial­y­sis-hawk­ing Mark Zucker­berg, a super-cere­al Al Gore, and an emp­ty-head­ed Ivan­ka. That’s Serafinowicz’s wife, the actress Sarah Alexan­der, doing the dead-on Julie Andrews impres­sion, though I must say I am most amused by the Jared Kush­n­er returned to his true form as a smug Brahms: The Boy II-look­ing child with the face of a man.

A recent New York Times piece about the video makes men­tion of plans for an entire­ly deep­faked fea­ture film around Fred Sassy and the dig­i­tal­ly manip­u­lat­ed Trump, the first film of its kind. Bet­ter that than the reports that cir­cu­lat­ed about the com­put­er­ized ghost of James Dean com­ing out of death’s retire­ment to be insert­ed into a some deeply accursed new film.