Mr. Mackey, the school counselor, is giving a drug and alcohol prevention lecture to the class, emphasizing that smoking, drinking, marijuana and LSD are bad.
He passes a sample of marijuana around the class so that the children can learn its smell, but it is never returned (it's later revealed that Mr. Garrison stole it, as he is seen watching Teletubbies while high).
When they learn more about what a bris is, and misconstrue it as a party where they are going to cut off his penis, Kyle tries to find a way to hide his brother from his parents and the circumcision process.
Kyle puts Ike on a train to Lincoln, Nebraska and makes an Ike-style doll out of meat bones in an attempt to not arouse his parents' suspicions.
This backfires when the doll is mauled by a rabid dog that subsequently gets run over by a truck, which leads Kyle's parents to think that Ike is dead.
At the funeral, Kyle finds out that Ike is not his biological brother, but was adopted from Canada due to the tombstone featuring the Canadian flag.
[2] At the beginning and end of the episode, there are scenes where the kids imitate Mr. Mackey's voice to him, while he is oblivious to the fact that he is being made fun of.
Ever since the recurring characters Terrance and Phillip were established to be Canadians in the season one finale "Cartman's Mom Is a Dirty Slut", and the subsequent season two premiere "Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus",[3][6][7] all Canadian characters on South Park have shared the same simplistic design: having simple beady eyes and a floppy head made up of two halves.
[8] While Ike had been on the show since its first episode, the writers originally did not know that he was going to be Canadian; he was retroactively made one based on his visual similarity to Terrance and Phillip.
[6][9] Ike's backstory would play an important role in the film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,[6] which involves a fictional American–Canadian war, as well as in future episodes of the series, such as the season seven episode, "It's Christmas in Canada", in which Ike's biological parents take him away from the Broflovskis and bring him back to Canada.
[13] As the story progresses, Kyle questions his initial beliefs, and forms the episode's central moral by saying that "Family isn't about whose blood you have.
The way the episode portrays Mr. Mackey's lack of real knowledge about drug use and addiction has been described as an example of South Park satirizing left-wing politics, when "they lead to the sort of hypocrisy inconsistent with a proper open society".
[15] Part of the episode revolves around the practice of religious male circumcision in Judaism, and the related ceremony called the brit milah or bris, and the boys' misunderstanding of the tradition.
Cannabis is also referred to by various names, including weed, grass, pot, and marijuana, in which Mr. Mackey constantly pronounces the letter j as /dʒ/ (as in jam), which makes Kyle mispronounce the drug as "marry-Jew wanna".
[16][17] In his drug prevention speech, Mackey claims that LSD was made famous by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, former members of The Beatles.
During Ike's supposed funeral, a bagpipe player starts playing the Hebrew folk song "Hava Nagila".
When Stan tells Kyle what he thinks a bris means, a dolly zoom is used, which is an unsettling filmmaking effect often used to show that a character is undergoing a major realization.
[22] The episode scheduled for April 1, 1998, promised to resolve the cliffhanger ending of the first season finale, "Cartman's Mom Is a Dirty Slut", regarding the identity of Cartman's father,[23][24] but was in fact an April Fools' Day joke on the creators' part: "Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus", an entire episode revolving around the two title characters.
[1][25][28][29][30] "[...] 'Ike's Wee-Wee' was subtle and low-key – proof that deep in its mischievous little heart 'South Park' is a show with sweet, kind moments sandwiched between scatological humor that also has a point."
[37] In 2008, the line was referenced in the dissenting opinion of a judge, in a case of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
[39][40] In 2011, during a judiciary committee hearing about a marijuana-related bill in Denver, Colorado, a representative showed off a potential packaging for edible marijuana products.
According to a group called the Cannabis Therapy Institute, the label on the package, which bore the placeholder text, "Legal and governmentally approved statement describing that pot is bad, M-ok", was a reference to the South Park episode.
Episodes of season two have also been released digitally, on services such as Amazon Video,[45] the iTunes Store,[46] and Xbox Live Marketplace.