Created by Mike Judge, 30, Beavis and Butt-Head are cruel caricatures of the real losers who actually bankroll the network. “I don’t think anybody said, ‘We’re making fun of the people who watch MTV’,” says Judge. “It just happened.” They play heavy-metal air guitar, lewdly ogle the chicks in the videos and take their pleasure mostly in dumb atavism. The mud-wrestling pit at Babes R’ Us represents their mecca; frog baseball, their idea of sport. They’re stuck in a particularly ungainly sink of puberty. When a light bulb flashes over Butt-Head’s head to mark the arrival of an idea, the bulb belongs in a refrigerator.
The kick of “Beavis and Butt-Head” is that for 30 minutes of uncivilized fun, the show offers no wise foil to n TV the leads knuckle-headedness, no moral compass; we’re alone with them on their descent. “Every once in a while they get their comeuppance in the end,” says judge. “But it’s funnier when they get away with it’” This kind of selfreflexive savagery has become an MTV trademark, but Beavis and Butt-Head wield it with a particularly keen edge. To like these guys is, damningly, to join them.
That means we’ve come a long way, from Semio-text to semiliterate butt jokes, all in one lifetime. Compared to Beavis and Butt-Head, Bart Simpson reads Shakespeare. But like Bart, these chronic nonachievers are wickedly, unredeemingly funny. Sometimes a mind is no big whoop to waste.
