Beavis and Butt-head raised all kinds of interesting questions during the five years of its production. Most of the furor over Beavis and Butt-head has focused on their misadventures--the plotlines of each episode, which typically involved random destructiveness, defiance of school authority, or attempts to score with chicks. Consequently, Beavis and Butt-head have been accused of representing and encouraging everything that is wrong with the youth of today: violence, lack of motivation, disrespect for authority, and dire lack of culture (in Matthew Arnold or E. D. Hirsch's sense of culture). Alternatively, the show is sometimes said to be a brilliant and wise satire of exactly the same things.

All the controversy did wonders for the show's ratings during the five years that the show ran on MTV (1993-1997). Meanwhile, debate about the morality and appropriateness of the show's story lines tended to polarize critics and overshadow other sorts of questions about the show. This essay will address one of those overlooked questions: Why does MTV broadcast and support Beavis and Butt-head, a show which is often critical of the music videos that are MTV's bread and butter? To answer that question, I'm going to examine what exactly happens when Beavis and Butt-head watch music videos and how this watching can be read by viewers.

Beavis and Butt-head's video viewing is separated from the rest of the episode. The story line cuts off, or we return from commercial, to find the boys seated on their couch. This separation does two things. First, it suggests to us, the viewers, that watching music videos is a perfectly natural activity for Beavis and Butt-head. It's the default setting: if they aren't at school or out causing mayhem, they will be in front of the TV. They don't need a reason to turn on MTV, and one is never given. Second, the isolation of video watching from the rest of the story line allows us (or requires us) to watch these segments in a different way than we watch the rest of the show. The story lines often rely on irony for humor, and the irony is directed against the school system, political correctness, adults, and Beavis and Butt-head's particular brand of stupidity--nothing that an MTV viewer is likely to strongly identify with. The story lines, then, are relatively unproblematic for the viewer. In the video segments, however, irony is directed at the act of watching MTV, so the show's viewers also become implicated--they're tuned in. This sort of self-consciousness needs to be separated from the rest of the show in order to keep the plotlines more stable and easily interpreted.

Beavis and Butt-head don't watch MTV's regular programming. There are no VJs, and there are no themed shows such as Headbanger's Ball or 120 Minutes. The videos that they watch are often old or obscure; they don't ever seem to include MTV's top ten.

Beavis and Butt-head have a simple system of evaluation. The video either "sucks" or it is "cool." Particularly good videos "rock." These judgments are not random, though the criteria are highly idiosyncratic. Their criteria for a good video are more or less summed up by Butt-head's comment about a Motley Crue video: "This video has fire, cars, and tattoos. Now all it needs is chicks." Heavy metal bands are almost always cool, unless they are trying to sing a ballad. Long haired singers, scantily clad women, and any sort of destruction (especially explosions or fire) visually signal a cool video. Story lines or social commentary are often totally lost on Be, avis and Butt-head, but do not necessarily interfere with a video's coolness provided enough hard rock elements are there. For example, the video for D.R.I.'s song "Acid Rain" creates a post-environmental-disaster world where people have inhalers and ponchos to protect themselves from the polluted atmosphere. Beavis and Butt-head don't care about that; they think the video is cool because the song is loud and the video shows people being beaten. Beavis and Butt-head also appreciate rap and some R&B videos, again excepting the slow songs. These videos meet their approval because they often include curvaceous women in tight clothes and because the boys are impressed with particularly fast rapping.

Beavis and Butt-head almost uniformly hate "college music," the fuzzily defined genre of the alternative and artsy. Any medium-tempo song with angst-ridden lyrics is going to suck in their opinion. As they watche a Violent Femmes video, Beavis comments "I bet these guys went to college and stuff." Butt-head replies "Yeah, and I bet they paid attention. Losers." Likewise, most slow ballads, regardless of genre, suck. White guys rapping or doing R&B songs suck (e.g., the band Color Me Badd). Most European bands, and particularly Ace of Base, suck; as Butt-head comments regarding a video by the Swedish rapper Stakka Bo: "We have enough crap in this country. Why do we need to go to Europe to get it?" Certain video elements prompt scorn. The use of printed text in videos always upsets the nearly illiterate Butt-head, who regularly comments, "If I wanted to read, I'd go to school." The boys despise most artistic editing or camera work and generally object to any sort of plotline in the video--they turn off ZZ Top's video for "Legs" because it's telling a story.

Viewers understand Beavis & Butt-head's video criticism in diverse ways. Published responses range from those that take the show literally to those that emphasize the complexity of a show on MTV which implicitly criticizes the content of MTV.

There are two readings of Beavis and Butt-head that assume the show should be understood in terms of what it actually says. The first is what I call the Adolescent Male reading. It agrees that Beavis and Butthead's comments about videos are right on target. Heavy metal rocks, printed words suck, and Beavis and Butt-head are reproducing someone's real experience as a viewer of MTV. For example, many of the websites devoted to Beavis and Butt-head seem to take them at face value, as two boys who are cool by virtue of their tastes and their juvenile delinquency and who mean what they say. For example, "Tadow's Beavis and Butthead Page" begins by proclaiming "Beavis and Butthead are real, and they kick ass, they eat lots of nachos and want chicks, to bad they never score. Check out these great sounds." The page offers sounds and pictures that visitors can download. Similarly, "Craig's Beavis & Butt-head site" and "The World of Beavis and Butt-head" provide clips, sounds, and pictures from the show with little attempt to evaluate or comment on this material.

The second straight reading also assumes the show means what it says, but finds that meaning reprehensible. This view, which I call the Moral Majority reading, is characterized by its belief that Beavis and Butthead are corrupting the youth of America through their antisocial antics and bad language. Criticism of this sort tends to focus on the show's plot lines, sometimes arguing that they directly lead to problems. The most famous example of how the show damages youth is the case of a five-year-old boy in Ohio who set fire to his home, allegedly as a result of watching Beavis and Butt-head. While the network "[did] not believe that the Beavis and Butt-head cartoon was responsible," it promptly moved the show to a later time slot and removed all references to fire in the episodes (Flint 22). Less sensationally, the Washington Post reported that "Beavis and Butt-head are the new Dumb Standard" and that the show was "... much agonized over, with worried detractors invoking the specter of complete societal collapse to describe its potential ill effects" (Shales G1).

Interestingly, it's much easier to find references to the show's "worried detractors'" than articles by them. One representative of this straight reading of the show, however, is Phyllis Zagano. Writing in America, a publication of the Catholic Church, Zagano writes about the threat that Beavis and Butt-head and, more generally, amoral MTV culture pose:

But they represent the worst of looser [sic] adolescents of every age and nationality for whom MTV's escapist fantasy is as close as they will ever get to human relations. Beavis and Butt-head cannot compete with the Bible or with any other evocation of sanity, but they and their medium may in fact be replacing it. (6)

Zagano's reading of the show is notable for its apocalyptic tone and also because she links the specific dangers of Beavis and Butt-bead's behavior with a more general threat from television, which Beavis and Butthead somehow represent. James Gardner also notices that those who criticize the show's content link the boys' behavior to a generalized cultural phenomenon. He comments in National Review that "the program has been assailed by certain mirthless people as exemplifying everything that is wrong with an overly violent nation served by unscmpulous networks" (61).