TV & Radio

You can keep The Simpsons. Beavis and Butt-Head was clearly better

Mike Judge’s cartoon was much smarter than its characters, but it resonated with young people because it pulled this off without trying to appeal to their parents

Beavis and Butt-Head was always much smarter than its characters, but it resonated with young people because it pulled this off without trying to appeal to their parents. Photograph: Paramount+

Jason Zinoman
Tue Oct 11 2022 - 05:00

When Beavis and Butt-Head premiered in spring 1993, The Simpsons was finishing up what many now consider not just its greatest season, but perhaps the greatest ever. Beloved by critics and comedy nerds, it was producing classic episodes like Marge vs the Monorail (written by Conan O’Brien), building a reputation that earned it second place on a recent Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest shows in history. Beavis and Butt-Head didn’t make the cut.

Yet if you talked to me back then, I would have told you with sniggering teenage confidence that the critically ignored Beavis and Butt-Head, a crudely drawn cartoon about two idiots chuckling over music videos, was clearly better. This was no provocation but a considered take – one I don’t regret. Can I explain why Beavis pulling his T-shirt over his blond bouffant and declaring himself the Great Cornholio made me laugh louder than anything Bart Simpson has ever done? No, but it’s true. Sometimes life (and thus comedy) is stupid.

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Mike Judge, who created the cartoon along with directing cult movies like Idiocracy and Office Space, is a master of the moronic. It’s why the new Paramount+ streaming service made a major investment in his dormant animated creation, putting old seasons online while rolling out a solid new movie, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe, and an even better rebooted series that captures just enough of the original delirious spirit to make you want to imitate the old catchphrases. (”Are you threatening me?”, “Fire! Fire!”)

This is part of a broader corporate strategy playing on the nostalgic impulses of those of us raised on a steady diet of MTV and VH1. There’s a reunion of the original two casts of The Real World (takeaway: time heals few wounds) and a revival of Behind the Music. While the reality and music-documentary genres have grown plentiful enough to make those shows seem unnecessary, Beavis and Butt-Head remains singular. Its new version includes the title characters as teenagers, but also a few episodes depicting them in middle age, and they all hit comic notes with moseying cadences you can’t find elsewhere.

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The film Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is among the new Paramount+ offerings. Photograph: Paramount+

Beavis and Butt-Head was always much smarter than its characters, but it resonated with young people because it pulled this off without trying to appeal to their parents. Most ambitious animation, including Pixar movies, tries this trick of telling jokes for one generation layered with references for another. It can be done well, but there’s a price, because kids can tell when you’re talking over their heads. Judge would never smuggle in a satire of Gilbert and Sullivan, as The Simpsons did, and his plotting was pointedly indifferent. What mattered to him was capturing the language and attitude of a specific kind of bored, nihilistic boy. As it happens, he also created one of the most memorable acerbic girls of the era, Daria, who started on Beavis and Butt-Head before getting her own show.

When Butt-Head tittered at a vaguely sexual-sounding word (“He said ‘hanging’”), it was juvenile but familiar. So was the perspective that identified some things that were cool (explosions, lizards, breaking stuff), others that sucked (college, words, alt-rock) and nothing in between. When television children were still speaking in zingers, these guys were defiantly inarticulate. In the rare moments that Beavis made a point eloquently, Butt-Head slapped him. But there was a catchy music to their stammering (the way Butt-Head said “hey baby” sticks in the mind), betraying an unmistakable love of the sound of words.

Beavis and Butt-Head was always much smarter than its characters, but it resonated with young people because it pulled this off without trying to appeal to their parents

Judge’s dialogue was most famous for its steady bass line of grunting laughter. This only seemed stylised. There’s much more laughing in the real world than in our entertainment, most of it not a response to a joke. Beavis and Butt-Head was the only show that reflected this.

The series belonged to the last decade when sneering at television, and those who watch it, was a respectable prejudice. It’s tempting to say the show came about before the culture war politicised everything, but Beavis and Butt-Head was actually a magnet for criticism and moralising. Controversies about viewers imitating the cartoon were of great interest to journalists but seemed ridiculous to fans. Who would want to be like Beavis, the sycophant forever trying and failing to “score” with girls? Or his alpha pal in braces?

Beavis and Butt-Head in the rebooted version of the series. Photograph: Paramount+

Judge satirised liberal teachers and hypocritical authority figures, but his primary sources of mockery were the title characters, who spent entire episodes trying and failing to pull off the prank of ringing someone’s doorbell and running away. The heart of the show was them watching and commenting on music videos, a form no serious critic spent much time on. And while it was not the first pop culture product to regularly portray characters analysing other pop culture products (Mystery Science Theatre 3000 premiered earlier), a big part of the humour of Beavis and Butt-Head, particularly for a budding critic like myself, was essentially watching the performance of criticism.

The boys could be withering, as when Butt-Head asked of an Amy Grant video, “Is this a Clearasil commercial?” And they could surprise you, as when they were won over by the Bee Gees. Judge realised years before Jon Stewart did on The Daily Show that showing something absurd, then making a face, is all you need for television comedy. Music videos matter less today, but certain themes from the show are only more relevant. In a running joke from the beginning of the series, nothing seemed real or important to these guys unless it was on a screen – even moments you would expect them to find hilarious, like walking in on the principal getting spanked.

The reboot, now called Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head, drills down on this point and updates the content they critique to include TikTok videos, YouTube how-tos and ASMR footage.

The new show’s look is a mite slicker and the comic situations are set up and executed better, including episode one in which Beavis and Butt-Head mistake an escape room’s bathroom for the place they need to escape. When Butt-Head stares into a toilet, sticks a finger in the air and says: “Now why would someone put a turd in a toilet?” you know the rightful stupidity has been preserved. It’s also a nice surprise to see the new show understand that there are more laughs to be had from Beavis repeating the word “manslaughter” than from any clever joke.

Mike Judge understood that while comedy is hard work, hard work isn’t funny

But the writers can’t help but jack up the ambition. Butt-Head takes antidepressants (his new gentle laugh is disconcerting) and imagines an alternative universe where Beavis and Butt-Head are smart. In a religion-themed episode, Beavis sees Jesus Christ in a nacho. Seeing what happens to these delinquents in middle age is perhaps inevitably dark, with Beavis, in pants (the horror), sounding like a MAGA fan, albeit one too clueless to vote. Shoehorning Beavis and Butt-Head into a 12 Angry Men satire is an amusing premise but feels like something The Simpsons would do. There are signs of strain.

One of the most telling moments in the original show came when Butt-Head spotted a guy in a video and asked, “Is that that Christian Slater dude?” Beavis tried a pun: “It’s like, uh, Christians? Later, dude.” Butt-Head responded with disdain: “Beavis, quit trying to be funny. It never works.”

To Butt-Head, nothing sucks more than trying. On this point, teenage affectation and a certain philosophy of wit overlap. Mike Judge understood that while comedy is hard work, hard work isn’t funny. Butt-Head would probably agree, chuckle, then add, “You said ‘hard.’” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.