The Strange Short History of Beavis and Butt-Head

Could it be that Mike Judge discovered an itch that simply refuses to go away?

Do you remember your first reaction to the phenomenon of Beavis and Butt-Head? Was your first encounter with the lads adventitious — was it unexpected; a full, frontal attack on your sensibilities? Or, was it serendipitous, in the sense that it was unexpected, shocking even, but still, you couldn’t get enough of it?

I suspect your answer is generational. That first group is older. They felt a bit overwhelmed and threatened by what appeared to be B &B’s motiveless actions that nearly always veered away from what was socially acceptable, and often illegal.

The second group — the Serendipitalists, we’ll call them — are younger. They were raised by the first group. They applauded Beavis and Butt-Head’s lack of forethought. They cheered their careless spontaneity and rib-nudged and chuckled at their consequences. Motives be damned! Motives got us into WWI and II. Motives dragged us into Vietnam.

Keep in mind, I’m a child of the 40s and 50s. Our children, now middle-aged and older, never tire of chiding Roseana and me about how we censored their childhood movies and television watching. My oldest son, age 51, reminds me how he wasn’t allowed to watch Speed Racer cartoons because of their violence. When Married with Children aired in 1987, we prohibited our children from watching it, although (and probably because) it was the topic of conversation among their peers. I don’t remember the specific reason we disallowed it. Only that it pushed the boundaries of social acceptability.

My next-to-youngest daughter, Sunshine (who would have lived up to her hippie name, if she were born a decade earlier) was the one who introduced me to Beavis and Butt-Head. She was 17 at the time. I, her daddy, was 44 and was thoroughly appalled by the outrageousness of the duo he watched on that MTV episode. They threatened some foggily defined ideals I had lived my life by; the same ideals that shot me — and everyone else in the stadium or auditorium — to our feet and slipped our hands over our hearts with the first notes the Stars Spangled Banner’s “Oh-wo say can you see …”; ideals I didn’t have to think about because they were there, just under the surface, to protect ... something or other … that needed our vigilance.

I suspect that once I was left alone, and Sunshine was off telling her friends of her Daddy’s latest harumph and bobbling her head to her friends’ accounts of how ballistic their folks had been, I watched another episode with the door closed and the volume down and allowed myself to smile and chuckle at some of their milder antics.

Most of the people reading this are probably card-carriers from the Royal Order of Serendipitalists. Yours is the wave of the future — a wave on which we Adventitionists had best learn to mount our surfboards or be sucked under and ground into the sands of fuddy-duddyism.

Mike Judge’s 1992 short film, Frog Baseball caught MTV’s attention and in 1993 was expanded into a series called Beavis and Butt-head, which ran for seven seasons. According to Wikipedia’s account, the series:

“…received widespread critical acclaim, particularly for its satirical, scathing commentary on society. It was also a subject of controversy for its violent content.”

Arguably, such social commentary often comes as a kind of spur in society’s hide at a period in which they were beginning to get too comfortable in their own skin. Did Mike Judge, former physicist-turned-cartoonist-turned-writer, sense a certain sludge of complacency in 1990 America, having come out of the cold war, with an economy that was booming, and being again a world power?

What was, or who were, the spur in society’s hide?

Again, our buds at Wikipedia describe B & B as “two unintelligent teenage delinquent couch potatoes […] who lack social skills.” Moreover, they have no adult supervision, and while they attend a mythical high school, in a mythical city in the very real state of Texas, they seem to control their own educational destiny. Often violent, without harboring any remorse over the consequences of theirs or others’ actions, they were capable of laughing uproariously at a slip and fall on a banana peel, long after the ambulance carted away the victim of a broken spine!

But what the millions of viewers listened for from each episode was the familiar, “heh-heh” chuckle that preceded a one-liner. And that one-liner would be repeated on high school and college campuses, and corporate water coolers across the nation. “While inexperienced with women, they share an obsession with sex and tend to chuckle whenever they hear words or phrases that could be even vaguely interpreted as sexual, carnal or scatological.” (Wikipedia link above.)

If you can’t bring up an example in your mind, here’s one from a 2021 Superbowl commercial:

Why can we, who have evolved so far above Beavis and Butt-head’s scanty intelligence, find commonality with our own immaturity.

Those lines allow us to experience our own immaturity vicariously. And I think it serves its function as a safety valve so that we as individuals don’t get too smug inside our individual skins.