What ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ Teach Us About Art & Criticism

Tomorrow is an auspicious day. It is the 25th anniversary of Beavis and Butt-Head, the animated show that inspired comedians and forced safety disclaimers.

It’s also a show that I initially hated. My earliest memories of watching Beavis and Butt-Head can be summed up in the phrase: “Ew…gross.” As a prissy, bookish girl, I thought Beavis and Butt-Head were mean, ugly, cruel, imbecilic delinquents. And you know what? They were. At first glance, there was literally nothing to redeem them. But then, after re-appraising them over liters of Mountain Dew and too many slices of Domino’s Pizza, I began to not only find them charming, but illuminating.

There is a deep connection between the high and the low. Art is at times a transcendent force lifting us out of our squalid lives, and at other turns, it is a cracked mirror showing us ourselves at our worst — and sometimes all we can do is laugh. Beavis and Butt-Head is simultaneously an example of this low kind of art, as well as a searing portrayal of how our personal taste affects our appreciation of art.

In case you never caught the show in its MTV glory days, each episode of Beavis and Butt-Head followed the titular characters — a couple of pervy, metal-head, ninth grade losers — as they navigated through various misadventures in their small town. Beavis was the blonde one and Butt-head was the slightly higher status one, and together they served up dumb, scatological humor.

The irony is that Beavis and Butt-Head might have given me my first crash course in how to appreciate art. My older sister could drag me to galleries full of Van Gogh, but it was Beavis and Butt-Head who gave me a road map for how to grapple with art on a personal level. It wasn’t just that, for the very first time, I was able to change my mind about how I felt about a television show. I was also given an example of how to wrestle with all forms of art and media. Beavis and Butt-Head taught me not only about the fluid nature of personal taste, but also about how to be a fan and a critic.

Because it was an MTV show, each episode came with a canny network tie-in: Beavis and Butt-head would watch music videos and appraise them. These interstitial moments, crafted with improvised jokes from creator Mike Judge, doubled as a perverse cultural curriculum. They were also dumbly funny.

The first thing that usually happens when Beavis and Butt-Head watch a video is they comment on what it looks or sounds like. This could be a visceral reaction to the genre of music — they often get excited for grunge or metal  — or a commentary on the visuals. Beavis and Butt-Head also ask insipid questions, but moreover, they project their own experiences, wishes, fears, and desires onto the videos. And from there, they often have a conversation. It’s usually a ludicrous conversation that reveals their own idiotic biases, but it is a conversation inspired by art nonetheless.

A specific example of this is Green Day’s “Basket Case.” Beavis asks obviously, “How come that guitar is in the hospital?” Which leads to them actually calling out how the set design evokes the plot and setting of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Then this conversation devolves into Butt-Head (incorrectly) correcting Beavis on PC terminology. Finally, the video inspires Butt-Head to remember a really off-color joke about masturbation. In a 90 second clip, they go from inquiring about an odd detail in the video to identifying an artistic allusion to having a “conversation” about social issues to relating it to something that’s of their own personal interest. It’s an almost laughably straight-forward snapshot of how we interpret art through the prism of our own experiences.

Because really, that’s what they are doing in those video segments: confronting art, commenting on it, and then relating it to their own life. They often apply their own taste to their judgments, but so do all of us. It’s undeniably a stupid comic portrayal of how we take in art as fans and critics, but it’s still a pretty accurate one.

Still, Beavis and Butt-Head can be considered as art as a whole, frog baseball sketches and all. Hidden in their coarse humor is a painful reflection of human life. Are they strange, puerile teens with nary a bone of empathy in their body? Yes, but they also exemplify the parts of humanity we don’t often like to shine a light on. Grotesque, juvenile humor is not some aberration invented in the dorm rooms of the MTV generation. Enlightenment writers like Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire jokingly depicted giants drowning men in urine, families eating Irish babies, and mass orgies (sometimes involving monkeys). And have you read Catullus lately? That classical stuff’s nasty. 

What Beavis and Butt-Head taught me about art is that a lot of our appreciation of it indeed comes down to taste. If we’re not open to what a creator is offering, we’re just going to write it off, and say, “it sucks.” And if it’s our jam, then we’re going to start air-guitaring in delight with our friends.

Where to Stream Beavis and Butt-Head