Books, Arts & Manners: Leave It to Beavis

FOR over ten years the message of MTV has been, in essence, “Peace, Love, and Naked Surfing.” Even before the term Political Correctness entered common parlance, MTV was the epitome of it. Thus it must have come as a surprise to the network’s top brass that the most successful program in their history is Beavis and Butthead, which lavishes contempt on everything for which they have seemed to stand.

I like Beavis and Butthead. I liked them from the first time I channel surfed into their airspace and stilled the habitual restlessness of my thumb long enough to see what they were about. Crudely drawn cartoon adolescents, the blond-haired Beavis and the brown-haired Butthead are neither intelligent nor glamorous nor attractive. To be blunt about it, they are a pair of scrawny, pencil-necked nerds. The raspy-voiced Beavis always sits to the right of the irritatingly nasal Butthead, who is a little more intelligent and has marginally more class. Usually planted before a TV, Butthead faces us frontally while Beavis turns toward him, explicitly acknowledging Butthead’s superiority.

JG

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James Gardner

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FOR over ten years the message of MTV has been, in essence, “Peace, Love, and Naked Surfing.” Even before the term Political Correctness entered common parlance, MTV was the epitome of it. Thus it must have come as a surprise to the network’s top brass that the most successful program in their history is Beavis and Butthead, which lavishes contempt on everything for which they have seemed to stand.

I like Beavis and Butthead. I liked them from the first time I channel surfed into their airspace and stilled the habitual restlessness of my thumb long enough to see what they were about. Crudely drawn cartoon adolescents, the blond-haired Beavis and the brown-haired Butthead are neither intelligent nor glamorous nor attractive. To be blunt about it, they are a pair of scrawny, pencil-necked nerds. The raspy-voiced Beavis always sits to the right of the irritatingly nasal Butthead, who is a little more intelligent and has marginally more class. Usually planted before a TV, Butthead faces us frontally while Beavis turns toward him, explicitly acknowledging Butthead’s superiority.