With the exception of a single viewing at one of the rare occasions I actually got to watch cable television before college, I was unable to bask in the abject moronity of Beavis and Butthead until I started college in the fall of 1994. I loved it and watched it every chance I could, seeing every episode at least once, until its conclusion in 1997. That was one of the last times I ever saw an episode of B&B until last night. I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of this before, but I looked them up on YouTube, using the app in my iPhone, and watched various episodes while doing some household chores. I was surprised by something.
What was this surprise, you might ask? Because, what would be so surprising, why would one expect anything other than the same idiotic slapstick toilet humor I'd seen before? Well, what surprised me is how much I laughed my fucking ass off.
(I was also a little surprised that none of the episodes included their music video reviews; where has all that footage gone? It disappeared from the reruns of the show after it was over. Hmmmm.)
See, lately, I've been listening to (like at work) and watching a lot of serious things on YouTube, soaking it all up like an insatiable sponge, videos by scientists and political cowboys, by theists, Atheists and Deists, lots of things about science, politics, and religion. But, I think I've gotten burned out on it, I feel like I've dried up that well (even though, given the sheer number of YouTube users, that's probably not the case; I've seen all the videos there is to see from my favorite users at least). So last night I felt I needed a break from all that horizon-broadening. I thought, hey, I'll bet there's lots of B&B on there. And I found lots.
YouTube is pretty damn awesome, by the way.
So there I was, viewing things I hadn't seen in 13 - 15 years, and my god, I was shocked at how funny they were! Some of you might be surprised that I was surprised, but let me explain: I had expected them to not be as funny to me, now, as they were to me in my youth, before I was a grown-up, before I was out of college, married, with 3.5 kids. Of course, anybody who's read any of stuff I create here will know that I have quite an appreciation for sophomoric humor. But I had remembered Beavis and Butthead being so childish that I didn't expect I would find it nearly as funny, now in 2010, as I had in the mid-1990s, when I was just a little older than the title characters themselves.
What I discovered when watching them last night on my phone was something I'd never appreciated before, and actually, I might have found them more funny last night than I had in my late teens and early-20s: the humor of B&B is only crude on the surface, like the oil currently slicking across the Gulf. I runs deeper somehow. I say somehow, because as of writing this, I still don't have a completely solid understanding of this, but I'll attempt to hash it out here anyway. But part of it is that there's many different forms of humor going on, not just one - the toilet humor - that somebody only glancing at the crudely-animated shorts might deduce.
First, yes, of course, there's the farts, nose-picking, and bodily waste removal (one episode was all about urinating, another all about defecating). If I were to ever let my five-year-old watch this stuff, he'd find that hysterical I'm sure. But there's also some political humor. It is subtle, but it is there, especially episodes featuring Daria and Mr. Van Driessen. You also have some cultural humor. Virtually every episode pokes fun at the suburban southern United States, and even though it never explicitly says, that I recall, I'm pretty sure it takes place in Texas, as does one of Mike Judge's other creations, King of the Hill. And then of course there's the infamous Cornholio episodes, where Beavis conjures up a ridiculous parody of Latino culture. One episode in particular among those I watched last night was eerily relevant to current events, where Beavis, as Cornholio, actually gets deported to Mexico, and the irrational and xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants blatantly alive today in Arizona are excellently parodied. And that episode originally aired sometime in 1994 or 1995, not sure.
There's also slapstick and mild violence, something I've always loved (I'm a big Three Stooges fan). Sometimes the violence goes beyond mild, but most of the time it's not too bad. There's also plenty of absurdist and non-sequitor humor, and, last night at least, that's what got me the most. I laughed the hardest and longest at a single joke in their Halloween episode: after getting kicked in the peas by a father pissed off that they'd stolen his kids' candy bags - he yells "HAPPY HALLOWEEN!" sarcastically afterward - Butthead, while writhing on the floor in pain, chuckles and says "Huh huh... 'ween!'" It hit something visceral, a deep humor nerve, and it was because it was unexpected. Maybe if it hadn't been so long since I'd watched B&B I would have expected it more, but I'm not so sure of that. Even in a cartoon that's only a little more realistic than old Tex Avery shorts, you just don't expect that that would ever be the time and place, while bottle rockets of pain are shooting up from your groin area, to contrive a double entendre like that and mention it aloud. That's Butthead for you. And random, unexpected jokes like that is probably my favorite type of humor. It's the type that's far more clever than it seems on the surface. Not all people get this type of humor, but if you really get it, it can really get you.
Now I think I understand why their 1996 theatrical film, Beavis and Butthead Do America actually got "two thumbs up" from Siskel and Ebert. The first time I saw a movie poster for the film with the words "TWO THUMBS UP - Siskel and Ebert" I thought it was a joke. I thought it was the product of a sarcastic promotional department. But no, it actually did get two thumbs up. As Roger Ebert astutely pointed out in his review of the film (and this applies to the entire TV series): "Beavis and Butt-Head are so stupid and sublimely self-absorbed that the exterior world has little reality except as an annoyance or distraction." Further, I'll invoke him again, something he wrote later in the review when trying to explain why B&B held his interest so much, putting it eloquently probably better than I ever could: "Because B&B represent an extreme version of people we see around us every day, and because the movie is radical and uncompromising: Having identified B&B as an extreme example of grunge, disaffection and cheerfully embraced ignorance, the movie is uncompromising in its detestation of them." The point of B&B is not to celebrate them, but to present to us an extreme version of the rising tide of stupidity (the movie Idiocracy comes to mind). Especially considering this takes place in Texas, it can be relevant to something else in current events: the Texas School Board fiasco. If you take enough wrecking balls to the public education system in this country as those ignorant whackos are attempting to do, you might dumb the kids down enough to get real Beavises and Buttheads.
And that wouldn't be funny at all.