At one point in the first incarnation of the 1990s television show “Beavis and Butt-Head,” heavy metal-loving, pop-culture-eviscerating co-star Butt-Head made the following observation: “Some people are dumb.”
Oh, Butt-Head, if only you knew what was to come.
MTV — the network that first aired “Beavis and Butt-Head,” a show many condemned as a celebration of stupidity — has now brought the awkward and offensive teens back with new episodes. Like most mature adult men, I tuned in with nostalgic excitement.
The crudely animated pair sounded the same as always — nasally, mildly profane, wildly immature. They poked fun at music videos and, in a new twist, some of the reality television shows that now dominate MTV’s programming.
But it all seemed to fall flat. Gone was the edginess the show had when it first came along and bothered the daylights out of social conservatives who feared it would launch a generation of Satanists and pyromaniacs.
I thought about this for a few minutes. The original “Beavis and Butt-Head” show went off the air more than a decade ago. In the absence of those hormone-addled fools, we’ve devolved into an entertainment culture focused on Kardashians and Lohans and random people eating buckets of bugs for money.
And then it hit me: Has the world become too stupid for Beavis and Butt-Head?
“Poor Beavis and Butt-Head have been out-dumbed,” said Elayne Rapping, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo and an expert on media and popular culture. “It just doesn’t work anymore. It’s not unusual.”
And that, at the risk of sounding like a fud, is truly a sad state of affairs.
It’s important to remember that, for all its immaturity, “Beavis and Butt-Head” offered up some rather sharp satire of 1990s popular culture. By being incredibly dumb and reckless, the inseparable teens were, in a sense, mocking the often mind-numbing essence of music videos and the whole MTV culture.
“It did have a strong element of social commentary,” Rapping said. “Their whole education, such as it was, came from low-level popular culture. But now it’s no longer just low-level pop culture that’s silly or stupid. It’s more and more mainstream culture and politics.”
Along with reality television and 24-hour coverage of celebrity foibles, the political world does seem to be adding to our collective dumbing-down. Who can forget the summer of 2009, when disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich attempted to get the judge in his corruption trial to let him appear on a reality show called “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” (He was denied, so his wife, Patti, went on in his place.)
And at a September speech before students at Liberty University in Virginia, GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry joked about his high school academic performance: “I graduated in the top 10 of my graduating class — of 13.” The audience applauded. (sigh)
How can Beavis and Butt-Head compete in a world where intelligence is a political negative and the wives of onetime governors appear on television eating tarantulas. Where a person like Kim Kardashian — famous for little more than a graphic sex video — can focus the nation’s attention on her wedding, then announce a divorce 72 days later.
“The bar for stupidity, I don’t know whether you can call it raising it or lowering it, but the bar for being ridiculous and out there is now so high that Beavis and Butt-Head just don’t really shock anymore,” said Brian Balthazar, a pop culture commentator and editor of the entertainment website PopGoesTheWeek.com. “There was a shock that these two characters were on television. And now, ridiculous characters are the majority.”
Perhaps the original Beavis and Butt-Head were trying to send us a warning, one that got lost amid critics’ fears that the pair would transform innocent kids into juvenile delinquents. By and large, the kids turned out just fine, but we all somehow became too willing to accept stupidity — not clever satire, but flat-out stupidity — as the norm for entertainment.
And now we’re drinking daily from a river of reality-show dreck and political sideshow nonsense, and the bad boys who tried so hard to give us a glimpse into the future are just another couple of goofs on a couch laughing at whatever happens to be on.
Heh-heh-heh, indeed.
