Satire

Judge has created some of the sharpest, most prophetic comedies of the past few decades. Now his first hit, “Beavis and Butt-Head,” is back on the air.

I was going to the University of Texas at Dallas, part time, taking classes toward a master’s in math. I didn’t want to travel all the time, so my plan was to become a math teacher at a community college. I think for a lot of us—the old folks—there was a time when we were kids, in the seventies or eighties, and the Three Stooges would come on late at night on some weird channel, and it just seemed amazing. I thought, I’m just going to become a math teacher, and animation will be my hobby. But I just love the way comedy plays flat and wide—like in Keaton’s movies, which I’d been bingeing at the time—and you just see the whole thing. I love the way they just let it play in a wide shot. So much has changed culturally in the decades since “Beavis and Butt-Head” first appeared. You brought back a wilder, more anarchic comedy with “Beavis and Butt-Head” in the nineties. I’m always arguing with sound mixers about this, because now they layer all the sounds, and it’s funnier when it’s one pure, distinct sound like the Three Stooges had, which is probably just some guy sitting there with a coconut or smacking something. In June, Paramount+ aired “Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe,” the animated pair’s first movie feature since 1996, and their first appearance onscreen since 2011. Since HBO failed to extend his two-year, eight-figure contract in 2021, he and his longtime partner Greg Daniels (“ The Office,” “ Parks and Recreation”) have formed their own production company, Bandera Entertainment, with more than a dozen shows already in development. Both Beavis and Butt-Head were voiced by the show’s creator, Mike Judge. Judge, now fifty-nine, was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After graduating with a physics degree, he began sending out homemade cartoons to festivals, and soon became one of the most prolific, needle-accurate satirists of the past few decades.