Beavis and Butthead Generations

Or, was it more of a serendipitous addiction, in the sense that while it was unexpected, shocking even, it left you craving more of it?

I suspect your answer will reflect that of your generation.

The Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers described

That first group, the Traditionalists — which was, for me, made up of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers — felt a little (to a lot) overwhelmed and threatened by what appeared to be Beavis & Butthead’s motiveless actions that nearly always veered away from what was socially acceptable, if not, I don’t know, illegal.

The second group — the Serendipitalists, we’ll call them — those upbeat upstarts, will always be at war with the Traditionalists. After all, they were sired and raised by the first group. Their out-of-touch mamas and daddies championed that first group.

And the Serendipitalists from the 70s and 80s have already become the Traditionalists for the new batch of upbeat upstarts of the 2,000s. And as Sonny and Cher — for you still-wet-behind-the-ears Gen Beta’s, they were the already aging Serendipitalists of the 70s and 80s — so famously put it, “And the beat goes on, lottie dottie dey, lottie dottie die.”

Meanwhile, the Serendipitalists that this traditionalist is talking about — my kids — applauded Beavis and Butt-Head’s lack of forethought. They cheered their careless spontaneity and rib-nudged and chuckled at their consequences. Motives be damned! Motives got us into WWI and WWII. Motives dragged us into Vietnam.

It’s so hard to understand any of this unless you keep in mind that the author is a child of the 40s and 50s. Born in 1939, smack-dab in the middle of the Silent Generation, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Traditionalist! Our children — Roseana’s and mine — now middle-aged, never tire of chiding us about how we had censored their childhood movies and television watching.

My oldest son, David, now age 55, reminds me how he wasn’t allowed to watch Speed Racer cartoons because of their violence. When Married with Children aired in 1987, we prohibited our children from watching it, although (and probably because) it was the topic of conversation among their peers. I don’t remember the specific reason we disallowed it. Only that it pushed too hard at our conceived boundaries of social acceptability.

My next-to-youngest daughter, Sunshine (who, if she were born a decade earlier, would have lived up to her hippie name), was the one who introduced me to Beavis and Butt-Head. She was 17 at the time. I, her daddy, was 44 and was appalled by the outrageousness of the duo she had him watch on that MTV episode.

Beavis and Butthead threatened some foggily defined ideals I had lived my life by: the same ideals that shot me to my feet, along with everyone else in the stadium or auditorium, and automatically dropped my hand over my heart with the first notes of the Stars Spangled Banner’s “Oh-wo say can you see by the dawnzerly light …” — ideals I didn’t have to think about because they were there, just under the skin, to protect … something or other … that required our continuous vigilance … if we didn’t want something bad, albeit undefined, to happen.

Now, I admit that once I was left alone, and Sunshine was off telling her friends of her Daddy’s latest harumph and bobbling her head to her friends’ accounts of how ballistic their folks had been, Roseana and I felt duty-bound to watch another episode, but with the door closed and the volume down, and we allowed ourselves to smile and chuckle at some of Beavis and Butthead’s milder antics.

Most of the people reading this are probably card-carriers from the Royal Order of Serendipitalists.

Yours is the wave of the future — a wave on which we Traditionalists , alas! had best learn to mount our surfboards or be sucked under and ground into the sands of fuddy-duddyism.

A short history of Beavis and Butthead

Mike Judge’s 1992 short film, Frog Baseball caught MTV’s attention and in 1993 was expanded into a series called Beavis and Butt-head, which ran for seven seasons. According to Wikipedia’s account, the series:

“…received widespread critical acclaim, particularly for its satirical, scathing commentary on society. It was also a subject of controversy for its violent content.”

Arguably, such social commentary often comes as a kind of spur in society’s hide at a period in which they were beginning to get too comfortable in their own skin. Did Mike Judge, former physicist-turned-cartoonist-turned-writer, sense a certain sludge of complacency in 1990 America which had come out of the cold war with an economy that was booming; an America that was again a world power?

What was, or who were, the spur in society’s hide?

Again, our buds at Wikipedia describe B & B as “two unintelligent teenage delinquent couch potatoes […] who lack social skills.” Moreover, they have no adult supervision, and while they attend a mythical high school, in a mythical city in the very real state of Texas, they seem to control their own educational destiny. Often violent, without harboring any remorse over the consequences of theirs or others’ actions, they were capable of laughing uproariously at a slip and fall on a banana peel, long after the ambulance carted away the ultimate paraplegic victim of a broken spine!

But what the millions of viewers listened for from each episode was the familiar, “heh-heh” chuckle that preceded a one-liner. And that one-liner would be repeated on high school and college campuses, and around corporate water coolers across the nation. “While inexperienced with women, (see Wikipedia link above), they share an obsession with sex and tend to chuckle whenever they hear words or phrases that could be even vaguely interpreted as sexual, carnal or scatological.”

If you can’t bring up a one-liner in your mind, use this from a 2021 Superbowl commercial. Note the expressions on the other actors’ faces:

Why do we, who have evolved so far above Beavis and Butt-Head’s skimpy intelligence, find a touchstone with our own immaturity? Or even if we’re not ready to own up to that, who among us doesn’t recognize in our peers that “So-and-so is just like Beavis … just like Butt-Head!”?

Might those one-liners allow us to experience our own immaturity vicariously? And if you buy that, might its function serve as a safety valve so that we as individuals don’t get too smug inside our individual skins?

Want a more recent example of a chronologically adult Beavis or Butt-Head? Go no further than Michael Scott, the boss of Dunder Mifflin, in TV’s The Office. An avid viewer of the show could likely tell you how many times Michael Scott, with a knowing smile, followed an obvious sexual innuendo with the words, “That’s what she said.”

Or even more recently, in season 5 of The Big Bang Theory, we find Sheldon Cooper speaking through his D & D character, telling the other players, Howard and Raj, that he needs wood.

Innuendo didn’t begin with Beavis and Butthead.

No one from my generation can forget the pure vanilla personas of the silver screen cowboys, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. It might surprise some Silent Gen-ers and Baby Boomers — I know it knocked me one bubble off plumb — to hear our ol’ squeaky-clean cowboy buddy, Gene Autry sing this little ditty he composed: Bye Bye Cherry. (It’s a bit scratchy, but it’s short.) I'M INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING WARNING: for some of us, it will sling mud on an Idol that we might have spent a lot of our youth keeping highly polished. If you prefer the polished version of Gene Autry, DO NOT listen to this video ....

I wonder ... as I finish this and I glance out with these aged eyes on a fresh batch of young people, if there is now, or ever will be, a line drawn in the sand which represents the absolute limit to what we all know as decent — a line beyond which we dare not go?

Truly, I'm wondering. What do you think?

JS