Towelie, voiced by Vernon Chatman, is a talking "RG-400 Smart Towel" introduced in the fifth season episode "Towelie". The exact details of his creation are comically confused, but he was apparently genetically engineered to be an alien spying weapon, and was stolen by a paramilitary group before he simply "got high and just sort of wandered off" to South Park. He speaks in a high-pitched voice, and is usually seen either giving towel-related advice to the citizens of South Park or, more often, getting high on cannabis and voicing his permanent confusion.
After Kenny's death, the boys went searching for a replacement friend in the sixth season episode "Professor Chaos". Towelie, a possible candidate, was said to be "high all the time" and therefore unreliable. This episode also stated that Towelie is 17 years old in towel years. He also makes brief appearances in "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants" and "Red Man's Greed". He starred as the main character in "A Million Little Fibers", a parody of the controversy that surrounded James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces on The Oprah Winfrey Show, after it was discovered to have been partially fabricated.
By the episode "Crippled Summer", Towelie's addictions, which have come to include heroin and crystal meth, are addressed by his friends in an intervention, as a parody of the A&E documentary TV series Intervention.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone explained on the DVD commentary for "Towelie" that the character was conceived as a joking reference to the over-marketing of characters in the wake of the series' success. Eric Cartman, partially breaking the fourth wall, delivers the penultimate line of Towelie's eponymous episode: "You're the worst character ever, Towelie," to which Towelie responds, "I know".
Read more about this topic: List Of Recurring South Park Characters