The Stercoraceous Vision of Mike Judge

In his autobiography, Memories, Dream, Reflections, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung described several days of torment in his 12th year when his unconscious repeatedly erupted with an image of God sitting on a golden throne in heaven over a beautiful cathedral. Jung knew he was somehow being tested, that he must let the vision emerge completely if he was to know God in his fullness.

Summoning all his courage, he let it come: God in the blue sky; and then, from under the throne, a massive turd fell to earth and shattered the cathedral. Bliss flooded Jung's brain, and thereafter he knew God's plan for him was to "think abominations to experience His grace." But Jung never told his father, a conventional Swiss Reform minister, of his vision. He could not bear the responsibility of plunging him into the "despair and sacrilege" necessary for grace.

Artists do not always have the luxury of sparing innocent bystanders such despair and sacrilege. Take the case of Mike Judge. Several years ago, a friend was searching for something in the dictionary when he made a strange discovery. "Look at this," he said. "Sterculius, the Roman god of feces."

"I can use that someday," Judge through, and one day he did. He was working on a homemade cartoon in which the protagonists, a couple of glue-sniffing pubescents named Beavis and Butt-Head, attend a monster-truck "thrashaton," a spectacular orgy of destruction in a football stadium full of frenzied men. The monster truck crushed a new car, a folk singer pleading for the environment and a row of portable outhouses. A noxious, greenish-brown cloud with a stern face emerges from the demolished outhouses, and Butt-Head steps out of his otherwise illiterate character to gasp, "It's Sterculius, the Roman god of feces!"

Sterculius announces to the throng: "You have desecrated my temple! You offend me! Prepare to feel the brunt of my wrath!" The cloud then zips heavenward, whence it drops a massive turd on the stadium, filling it with shit.

"No, I never read Jung, never even took a course on psychology in college," says Judge in an empty office at MTV in New York City. "I was just desperate for an ending to the cartoon and remembered Sterculius. He really is in the dictionary, and the root became an adjective in English: stercoraceous, meaning `excremental.' But I know how Jung was feeling. The whole time I was making the cartoon, I was thinking, `Oh, man!' I was considering not putting my name on it - not just because of my parents, but older people in general. And my in-laws. It's embarrassing to them all."

His dread was even worse with the first cartoon in the series, Frog Baseball, in which Beavis and Butt-Head blow up a locust with a firecracker "Light one in his butt," says Butt-Head) and then take batting practice with a live frog. "My mom didn't like that one at all," says Judge. "I showed it once at this guy's house. He was having this cartoon-viewing party, and everything else was very cartoony, standard stuff. When Frog Baseball came on, this girl kept looking at the screen and then at me. She says, `He isn't actually going to his the frog, is he?' And then Butt-Head hits the frog, and she says, `God, you look so normal.'"

"No, he was certainly nothing like Beavis and Butt-Head as a child," says Mike Judge's mom, a school librarian in Albuquerque, N.M. "One thing you may have noticed about his personality: He seems to be completely out of it sometimes. That's because he's often thinking about something different than what everybody else is thinking. He's just very focused. I remember one time, in junior high, he came home with a bad math grade, and the teacher discovered the other kids were stealing his papers out of the folder and copying them and not putting them back. He didn't even notice, and that kind of thing happened quite often."

What did she think of Frog Baseball?

"I think it was strange. I think probably I was a little surprised. But then he said he'd heard people talking about `frog baseball,' and he wondered if that was what they really meant. But it certainly seemed a little off to me. He originally did it for submission to one of those animation festivals, and that's the kind of thing they were looking for. That might have had something to do with it."

Do the kids in her school know she's Beavis and Butt-Head's grandmother (divorced from Mike's father who now teaches at Fort Lewis College, in Colorado, she goes by her maiden name)? "I used to put up posters for the musical groups that Mike played in. But I haven't put up any for... uh... well, I don't have any."

What would she tell teachers who are complaining to MTV about the negative influence of Beavis and Butt-Head? "Did you ever read Highlights magazine for children? They have a cartoon strip called Goofus and Gallant. They were two little boys, and Gallant would always wipe his feet off before coming in the house, and Goofus would always track in the mud. Mike used to laugh and laugh at Goofus. So when people complain, I would just remind them that no one is going to laugh at a goody-goody, at the little boy who always washed his hands before dinner. And I would tell people that if they don't like the characters, they should look at the videos Beavis and Butt-Head comment on. Some of them are in much poorer taste."

So the other day I went to this petting zoo with a friend of mine who has a couple of toddlers. Inside this cage were a duck, a chicken, a rabbit, a baby goat and a lamb. The little girls would gently stroke each animal, and the little boys would run around screaming, and the adults would tell at them to knock it off. At one point the duck took a dump out of sheer terror, and the 5-year-old boy who had been tormenting it pointed and howled with delight. "That's the difference between boys and girls right there," said the kid's mom to another mom. "Only a little boy would notice that. We took him to the circus last week, and he could have cared less about the acts. The only thing he was interested in was when the elephant crapped. He talked about that all day."

This is the major diference between Beavis and Butt-Head and most other cartoons. Even in the classic Warner Bros. cartoons, bodies had no genitals or orifices other than nostrils (without booders and fingers inserted) and mouths (which never emitted vommit). Although Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck regularly clubbed, shot, blew up and cruelly tricked their foes, no one ever truly died. Wound would heal by the next scene, and the chase would resume. For Beavis and Butt-Head, death and sex and shit hang like the stench that appears to have frozen Butt-Head's nostrils into a permanent flare. He and Beavis regularly discuss the state of their genitals ("Sometimes I get morning wood in, like, late afternoon"); every 16 words, they make some anal reference (even Butt-Head's teachers call him Butt-Head); and that frog notoriously, shockingly, truly dies. According to MTV demographics, that mom at the petting zoo was right: The audience "skews maile" (although the letters indicate that a significant number of females are delighted to recognize B&B as accurate character studies), and it so skews because it captures something essential about the American male experience in a new way; that to exercise the power of like and death over small, defenseless creatures with efforless cruelty and stupidity can be really, really, funny.

I don't know why. I still get queasy when I think about this guy I knew who had a "wax museum" (he dripped candle wax on toads and salamanders) and a "gas chamber" (he pumped exhaust from the lawn mower into a box containing various woodland creatures). But I do know that when I tell other adult males about this guy, they usually crack up and reciprocate with stories about some other formerly youthful fiend who is now probably out there serial killing.

"I think more of them become engineers, for some reason - or doctors," says Mike Judgem who at the age of 30 is quite normal looking with his basic bluejeans, T-shirt and slightly receeding hairline. "It's weird that I'm known now for Frog Baseball. I was a serious, fanatical animal lover when I was a kid. I read all these books and knew the name of every animal in the mink family. Used to draw really pretty pictures of deer and things like that. When I started drawing cartoons in the sixth grade or so, it went in the other direction. I draw really sick cartoons. I'd go through phases where I'd try to learn to draw better, and it would always turn into a sick joke. I have this urge to deface my own art... Actually, I try not to think about it too much, because it seems to be working for me.

"I remember this guy telling be about what he would do to lizards, 'cause he would kill lizards to feed to his snake. I thought that was really funny when he was telling me. Then I went out with him to do it, and I thought, `Oh, no, we can't do this!' HE had this thing - you know how Indians had buffalo jumps? And they're stampede buffalo off a cliff? He'd do that with lizards at this drainage ditch with a cement cliff. He'd run them off it, and he did worse than that. He tried to light his cat on fire once. I think he's working in some lag now."

The second of three children, Judge was born in Ecuador, where his father was working as an organizer for the Cooperative League of the United States. The family then moved to Albuquerque, where his father taugh archaeology at UNM. Young Mike did well in grade school, did less well in chaotic public junior high and then made honor roll in a Catholic high school. "I did OK in math and science," he says. "Anything where the teacher's opinion of you didn't enter into it."

At the University of California at San Diego, he majored in physics, taking a year off to play bass, returning to get his degree in 1985. "I was always pretty practical," he says. "I wanted to be a musician or go into comedy, but I never understood how people got money doing that. I never had enough equipment. The counselors always said that if you got a degree in engineering and physics, you'd always be able to find a job, which is not true, but I was thinking, `At least I can make some money while I'm trying to do what I want to do.'"

For a year he did "slow, mindless work" for a military contractor, then gave music another shot, playing bass in blues-rock bands for Anson Funderburgh and Doyle Bramhall in Dallas. "I've been missing him ever since he left the band," says Bramhall, who wrote songs with Stevie Ray Vaughan and whose son, Doyle Bramhall II, play guitar in the Arc Angels. "There are musicians who play, and there are musicians who listen when they play, and Mike always listened." But as a career, music was requiring too many road trips. Judge took graduate math courses with the idea of teaching at a community college and began making animated cartoons at home in his spare time. His first two characters were Milton, who threatens to burn his office building if his boss moves his desk again, and Indred Jed, who does a public-service announcement against inbreeding.

One day in the summer of 1990, Judge was trying to draw this kid he remembered from junior high. It didn't much look like the kid, but when he came back to is a week later, it made him laugh, and that was enough. This was the birth of Butt-Head, with his short upper lip and massive gums.

"The guy I tried to draw, he had that laugh: `Huh-huh. huh-huh-huh,'" says Judge. "I looked in the mirror to see what my face did when I laughed like that, and I thought the face would be funnier if it was this other guy I knew in junior high, who has since got braces to correct the problem. And he had a really awful haircut. Actually, my hair is really unmanageable, so I may have gotten Butt-Head's hair from myself.

"There were probably four or five guys who inspired Beavis, just a little Bic-flipping pyro kid. I've noticed that 13-year-old metalheads haven't changed very much over the years. There are new bands, but they're still listening to AC/DC and all the same groups I was. It's just this funny, awkward moment in life when you want to be supermacho and show everyone you're not a kid anymore. You were serious, badass death-rock T-shirts, but you've got to put rubber bands on your braces."

A week after Frog Baseball appeared in an animation festival, Colossal Pictures picked up the short for MTV's series Liquid Television; Beavis and Butt-Head made their debut last September in the midst of much animated weirdness. The monster-truck short appeared eight episodes later. Executive producer Abby Terkuhle saw a door that had been kicked in by Bart Simpson and recently passed through by Ren and Stimpy, the asthmatic Chihuahua and obese feline whose scatologically surreal universe was delighting children at MTV's sister channel Nikelodeon.

In November, MTV started a Beavis and Butt-Head assembly line to put together 65 episodes, brings in MTV's staff writers and a few outsiders to flesh out the plot lines and dialogue. At one recent writers' meeting, most of the energy went toward innovative ways of saying "masturbation" ("Instead of `spanking your monkey,' let's habe them explore a cave and it'll be `spelunking your monkey'") and how to convey homophobia in a character without actually encouraging it in the viewers ("Instead of `choad smoker,' how about `choad enthusiast'?"). Judge remains the central creative force, however, supplying the voices of Beavis and Butt-Head and most other characters. Despite millions of imitators, only Judge can do the laugh properly.

Beavis and Butt-Head's universe is much less complete - or perhaps more left to the imagination - that that of the Simpsons, who are, for all their dysfunction, a traditional nuclear family, descended structurally from Ozzie and Harriet. True to their generation, Beavis and Butt-Head appear to be latchkey children, perhaps fathered by the same man who no longer comes around. Their mothers are otherwise occupied and figure not a whit in their stunningly tasteless activities. In one episode, they do a report on the Challenger disaster, pushing over a toy rocket in science class. On one level, it's hilarious as a display of contempt for pedagogic authority and as a sendup of a government propaganda ploy gone awry. On another level, it's horrifying when you think of the teacher and astronauts who actually died.

"What's the phrase?" say Terkuhle, who often repeats it: "Tragedy plus time equals comedy."

"The line is actually `Comedy is tragedy plus time,'" says Judge. "I got it from a Woody Allen movie."

"After the last election and the `choose or lose' campaign, I think we were sick to death of being polically correct," says Judy McGrath, creative director at MTV. "Beavis and Butt-Head came along at just the right time for comic relief. I see them as an extension of our best promos, which have always been irreverent."

Rumor at MTV is that McGrath doesn't like them so much. "My only concern was that they not be irredeemably mean," she says. "I wanted them to be more hapless than just viciuos."

What about painting Megedeth on Mr. Anderson's house, feeding him a deep-fried rat and mowing the botanical garden? What about hanging their friend Stewart by his underpants, goosing him with an egg beater and blowing up his kitchen while sniffing stove gas?

"The Stewart episode I had a hard time with," says McGrath. "But basically I trust Mike and the writers. The function of cartoons is do do what the rest of us can't, although I never wanted to play frog baseball myself."

It's hard to believe that the Christian right hasn't gone after Beavis and Butt-Head yet. They sniff paint thinner to get high, they call adult authority figures "ass wipe," they... "The writers haven't seen most of the hate mail," says McGrath. "I try to protect them. There doesn't seem to be an organized campaign yet, and there's no serious rebellion among cable operators. Some of the sponsors get the joke, and some are appalled, just like the rest of MTV. Mostly people are horrified by the languange. They can't believe someone would say `Woodrow' on TV. But for the most part, the show is still like a big secret>

Transfer interrupted!

It's amazed me how fast this all happened," says Judge. "Last summer I was wondering what I was going to do for a living. Now if these T-shirts dop well... I mean, my wife was planning on supporting me forever. She had a good job in Dallas, had been working part time since our daughter, Julia, was born. Now we live in New York, and she can just kick back and take card of the baby."

And what if Julia grows up to play frog baseball?

"I'll be right proud," says Judge. "Just so long as she doesn't blow up the house."