![]() The episode ends on the cringe-worthy caveat of him accidentally kicking his medication into a storm drain…then getting his arm stuck while attempting to pull the pill bottle out, thus starting the whole issue all over again. While he wanders around the store eating pizza samples, Beavis’ blood pressure actually does skyrocket. Or there’s “Blood Pressure,” in which the dimwits mistakenly think that a blood pressure testing machine is a ride, and Butt-Head makes very little attempt to help his friend out of it. ![]() “These guys think they’re funny,” Butt-Head comments at the end, “but they’re really just, like, stupid.” We’re just waiting for him to figure it out. The utter cluelessness and his panicked reactions make for a perfect episode because we’re already in on the joke. He honestly doesn’t understand how pregnancy works, and when he takes a pregnancy test, thinks it needs to go in his belly button. It’s hilarious because the hole his stupidity digs keeps getting deeper and deeper, and his panic is so genuine. One of my favorite episodes is “Pregnant Pause,” in which Beavis confuses constipation with being pregnant thanks to grossly misinterpreting a TV program and a couple of off-hand comments. Two-plus decades later, you still laugh, but the same things are funny for different reasons, like trying to figure out how these two idiots manage to survive. Growing up with the show, as I did in the early 90’s, you laughed because it was juvenile humor and that’s where you were in life. There’s not a lot of complex humor that goes into fast food mishaps and remembering not to copy one’s butt. Not that they ever learn from it, but this is a show where viewers can enjoy themselves without feeling bad, and without having to think too much. We’re meant to laugh at them, and a good 80 percent of the stupid things they do only manage to hurt them of the other 20 percent, probably half of that involves them getting some kind of comeuppance. The crux of Beavis and Butt-Head is that almost entirely, the joke is on them. In fact, the more time that passes, it seems even more ridiculous. They have a simple, outrageous humor that never gets old because it’s never stopped being absurd. Yet without the music videos, it’s made it easier to see how funny the crazy stories are. It’s the latter that made Beavis and Butt-Head famous, but thanks to rights issues, the music videos have largely faded away except for a few that MTV was able to include on the show’s DVD release and others that have been randomly uploaded to YouTube. In between their misadventures, they’d offer hilarious commentary on all kinds of music videos, from R.E.M. If you still haven’t seen it, the gist is that teenage miscreants Beavis and Butt-Head (both voiced by series creator Mike Judge, who’d go on to give us two other comedy classics in Office Space and King of the Hill) wander around the fictional city of Highland never really accomplishing much. And almost three decades later, especially in light of current world events, these two idiots are still hilarious – perhaps funnier than they’ve ever been. It’s one thing for Helen and Bliss to awkwardly come to terms with the teen’s sexuality it’s another for Bliss to make a jaw-dropping reference to Octomom, as if the episode needed to be time-stamped “Spring 2009.” Judge’s other works have striven for the timelessness of great comedy, but “Goode” feels too often like it’s pandering to people who TiVo “Best Week Ever.March makes 27 years since Beavis and Butt-Head originally premiered on MTV. What’s worse, though, is how too many current pop culture references are scattered throughout the script, turning what could have been another gentle lampoon of wacky characters into something with a two-week shelf life. Judge makes function follow form, and it renders the stories inauthentic. When Ubuntu tells his parents he wants to learn to drive, a shocked Helen asks, “W.W.A.G.D.? What would Al Gore do?” It’s groaners like that that keep the show from feeling real. The problem comes when, instead of allowing the jokes and plots to flow from the characters, Judge shoehorns them into clumsy situations just to make another awkward pun about recycling. Judge, who created the series with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, is working on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Hank Hill and the modest conservatives of Arlen, Texas, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The Goode family is a broadly stereotypical group of hardcore environmentalists: father Gerald (Judge), mother Helen (Nancy Carell), son Ubuntu (David Herman) and daughter Bliss (Linda Cardellini).
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