20 Questions: Mike Judge

Five years ago Mike Judge was unknown. Then his brainchildren Beavis and Butt-head went on MTV and became the world's favorite geeks. "The Beavis and Butt-head phenomenon," as the press termed it, spawned endless MTV appearances, as well as guest shots on the networks and tons of Beavis souvenirs and Butt-headed merchandise. They even gigged with Cher, singing, "I Got You, Babe, Heh-Heh-Heh."

Judge's cartoon became controversial—he was charged with fomenting pyromania and general grossness—but Beavis and Butt-head stumbled ever onward. Now comes their greatest test, a full-length movie released this month. Critics are advised to wear splatter guards.

"People expect a skinhead with swastikas when they meet me," says Judge, a balding 33-year-old millionaire who dresses in jeans and T-shirts. He drives his rusty trash-can of a car to a posh Century City office provided by Fox TV, home of his new cartoon series, "King of the Hill." Judge spends 16-hour workdays there, then races home to his wife and two baby daughters.

We sent Contributing Editor Kevin Cook, another balding dad with a potty mouth, to meet Beavis and Butt-head's creator.

"Judge is everything his work isn't—calm, thoughtful and self-deprecating," Cook says. "He works hard but never forgets how Warholian his story is—Texas egghead musician hatches cartoon craze.

"Now Judge must somehow top himself. He must point Beavis and Butt-head toward midadolescence. I think he'll succeed because he has that rare artistic gift—a perfect memory of junior high."

1.

[Q] Playboy: Do you slave over Beavis and Butt-head, or do their adventures just pop out of you like pimples?

[A] Judge: It's like what Michael Palin once said about Monty Python: "You can't put a guy in a Viking outfit and hit him with a chicken without careful preparation." A lot of planning goes into making Beavis and Butt-head completely lame and stupid. I write memos to the animators about the way Butt-head's top lip should curl when he says, "This sucks."

2.

[Q] Playboy: What, if anything, are B&B right about?

[A] Judge: The people who make arty, high-concept videos think they are so heavy and smart, but Beavis and Butt-head watch them and say, "This is dumb. It sucks." Or they'll see an explosion in the background and say, "Fire, cool," which sort of shoots down the whole thing. That's what I like about them. They may be idiots, but sometimes they're right. Sometimes the truth comes out if you let yourself be simpleminded.

3.

[Q] Playboy: Are they role models, and if so, for whom?

[A] Judge: No. They're dumb. They would like to be like the people on Beverly Hills 90210, but they can't get the numbers right. Beavis thinks it's 9029010. I'm always surprised when people think Beavis and Butt-head have hypnotized the youth of America, because I've never met a kid who doesn't get it, who doesn't see what losers they are.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Now that they're famous, are you tempted to tame them? Couldn't you get richer if you made them less disgusting?

[A] Judge: They're not like the Fonz. Remember the early Fonzie? He was actually cool. But then the character deteriorated. He fell into that TV trap—on one episode Fonzie shows what a big-hearted guy he can be, and by the last season that's all he is. Our show will never give you that sappy moment. You will never hear Beavis say, "You know, Butt-head, I haven't been a good friend to you lately."

5.

[Q] Playboy: Are Beavis and Butt-head reality-based?

[A] Judge: I used to see 13-year-olds in the mall in their badass Megadeth T-shirts, these guys who want to be heavy metal rebels but first have to go get their braces tightened. And I once played upright bass in a blues band in Kentucky and saw two teenage boys up front, each with that curled lip, making that "this sucks" face at me.

I got some of Beavis from a guy in Texas, where I was in an awful Top 40 band. This guy used to follow one of the singers around. He couldn't look you in the eye. He chuckled to himself a lot. They're still together—I saw the singer recently, and he said he gets by on unemployment and stealing from this guy. "He's so stupid," he said. "I take money out of his pants while he's asleep. Next day he says, 'Man, somebody's stealing from me!' and moves his money to the other pocket." Beavis is a little like him. He may get smacked around by Butt-head, but it's the price he pays. I mean, who else would hang out with him?

6.

[Q] Playboy: As we come off this past election year, rank Beavis, Butt-head, Sonny Bono, Dan Quayle and Ted Kennedy in order of intelligence.

[A] Judge: Butt-head, Quayle, Beavis and Bono. When he's sober, Kennedy's probably up there with Butt-head.

7.

[Q] Playboy: The boys once sang with Sonny's ex. Any chance they got lucky with Cher?

[A] Judge: She's a powerful presence. When she walks into a room you can almost hear a voice saying, "Ladies and gentlemen ... Cher." Yes, she took them backstage. She showed them her butt tattoos. But they didn't score. Beavis fouled it up as usual. He never realizes when a woman likes him—the only time he thinks of scoring is when he's home by himself—so he acts like a weirdo. Butt-head, who thinks of himself as an irresistible stud, starts getting pissed because he's not getting any, and finally the girl gets disgusted and leaves. It happened again with Cher.

8.

[Q] Playboy: Were the boys disappointed when Pamela Anderson Lee got married and had a baby?

[A] Judge: No. They respect Tommy Lee more than ever. And they think that baby will be the ultimate human being.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Who are the girls of their dreams?

[A] Judge: Anna Nicole Smith. Jenny McCarthy. There was talk of getting them on Singled Out, but I think the girls would run for the exits: "It's not worth that to be on TV!"

Beavis has a thing for Tinkerbell. And they both want to see Snow White naked. They figure that if she'd do a dwarf she must be easy. But it'll never happen. I can never let them get laid. That would be like letting Charlie Brown kick the football.

10.

[Q] Playboy: You're directing the epic Beavis & Butt-head Do America. How are they as actors?

[A] Judge: Difficult. I'll be on take 423 saying, "Beavis, think back to a time when you were sad." He says he had a cool dead mouse but he flushed it down the toilet. "OK, use that." "Use what?"

I do personalize them. I used to put their pictures in the studio and stare at them when I did their voices, but now I just shut my eyes and go to their world. It looks like my dreams. I dream in cartoons. Once I had a scary feeling, thinking, God, these guys are a bigger part of my mind than I am.

11.

[Q] Playboy: Some fans detect a homoerotic frisson in the show. Is it there and, if so, would Butt-head be the pitcher?

[A] Judge: They seem so preoccupied with saying they're not homos, it's suspicious. With two guys who always hang out together, you have to wonder. I can tell you that the guy in Texas who followed the singer around turned out to be bi. When he was working construction he'd bring home these guys in business suits. You'd hear bedsprings and banging on the walls in his room.

Yes, I think Butt-head would be the pitcher.

12.

[Q] Playboy: What will you remember about 1993, the year your show stormed pop culture?

[A] Judge: Beavis and Butt-head supposedly made a kid start a fire in a trailer park. It was all over the news. Later it turned out the place wasn't wired for cable. I was also charged with causing a cat's death. But Butt-head had only joked about putting a firecracker in a cat's butt, and anyway that practice has gone on every summer since there have been firecrackers and cats. After that I went on the Internet and told people, "Imitate everything you see."

It was funny how Beavis and Butt-head were talked about like real people. My name was hardly mentioned. I liked that. And I liked getting letters from women in their 50s, saying the show helped them break the ice with their sons. It helped them talk about sex without awkwardness. I still get letters like that.

13.

[Q] Playboy: Did you start fires as a kid?

[A] Judge: Not many. I tried to make bombs with my chemistry set, but they never worked. I had friend who took the fuel from my family's Coleman stove, poured it on our patio and lit it. He watched these huge rolling flames with a happy look on his face. I built an X-ray machine when I was a kid. I used a Tesla coil—it looked like the stuff in old Frankenstein movies. I'd sit with my hand in it, watching the green glow. Maybe all that radiation helped create Beavis and Butt-head—some kind of mutation. In those days I absorbed X rays and compulsively ate french fries. I almost got fired from my job for eating fries.

14.

[Q] Playboy: Weren't you a cook at a burger joint?

[A] Judge: I never got that high up. I've had bad jobs—loading chain-link fence in 100-degree weather—but fast food is the worst. I worked at a burger joint in Albuquerque where the cooks took the burgers off the grill and put them into the broth pan, a vat full of beef soup mix. You might get a burger that had been in there for four hours. The cooks had a theory about that: You didn't need to cook the burgers all the way, because anything in the broth pan turned brown anyway.

Later I worked at a different fast-food place. The food was much worse, and there was guy, a part-time security guard, who was scary scum. He tried to burn people with hot equipment. One night he gave me a ride home. On the way he pulled out a .357 Magnum and started waving it. I thought he was going to drive me out to the hills and rape me. But he let me go. He did other evil things, though, and got fired. Then one day he came in to eat. A friend of mine was working the grill. He hocked and—phwoot— spit a big loogie on the guy's burger. Then he covered it with cheese. We watched through a one-way mirror as the security guy ate his loogie burger.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any other pranks to confess?

[A] Judge: I got a degree in physics from the University of California at San Diego and worked for engineering firms, including a government contractor that helped make F-18 jets. We were bored one day, so my boss said, "Let's burn something." He got a suicide cord—an AC cord with two naked wires running out of it—and hooked it up to an electrolytic capacitor, which blew up like a firecracker. We had papers, desks, calendars catching fire. Another time he took us out to a Dumpster full of hundreds of fluorescent light tubes. He heaved a big rock up into them, setting off the coolest chain reaction, a long, slow boo-oo-ooom, an unforgettable sound.

16.

[Q] Playboy: One of your early cartoons features "frog baseball," in which helpless amphibians get smacked to pulp. How did you get that perfect squish sound at impact?

[A] Judge: That was a cool sound, too. I combined a baseball bat hitting a watermelon, a baseball bat on a punching bag, a piece of cow liver hitting a chopping block and a sword swipe. That was a cool sound.

17.

[Q] Playboy: Define the terms "butt munch" and "choad."

[A] Judge: I tried a term I remember from junior high, "ass munch," but it didn't clear standards. So I changed it to butt munch, which actually has a nicer ring. It almost sounds like an ice cream flavor.

Sometimes the words just pop up. I was improvising when I had Butt-head call Beavis a "butt knocker." I didn't mean anything homosexual by it, but Beavis got mad. "Don't call me that. I'm serious," he said. Butt-head is still dominant, but Beavis has been talking back more lately. He's evolving, becoming less dependent, maybe more of a spastic savant. As for "choad," one theory is that it's from the Spanish for sausage, chorizo. At my junior high school in New Mexico, kids would say choad for penis. Another theory is that it has something obscure to do with chinchillas.

18.

[Q] Playboy: What are Beavis and Butt-head's cultural imperatives?

[A] Judge: Stuff sucks. They think the Beatles suck. Picasso sucks, too. And what's funny to me is how powerless you are against that opinion. Could you convince these guys that Picasso is good? No. Never. So however great Picasso may be, there is this Beavis and Butt-head world where he sucks, and about a third of the population lives in that world.

19.

[Q] Playboy: What's their idea of a good opening line?

[A] Judge: They were impressed with Prince Charles when he told Camilla Parker-Bowles he wanted to be her tampon. "We thought that guy was a wuss," they said, "but he's pretty smooth."

20.

[Q] Playboy: What male celebrities do B&B admire?

[A] Judge: They look up to Engelbert Humperdinck. He can sing the shit out of a song, and he gets lots of chicks. They love his name, too.

the creator of beavis and butt-head charts their sex lives, names their favorite male celebrity and reveals the secret to the sound of frog baseball