Beavis and Butt-Head: Art imitating life or life imitating art?

I remember first hearing about Beavis and Butt-Head in grade seven. One of my peers, knowing my ability to draw cartoons, asked me if I could draw the characters from her new favourite cartoon. She then showed me a picture of the two ugliest cartoons I had ever seen (at this point my favourite cartoons were the over-polished Disney movies). I refused to stoop so low.

Not having parents who would let me watch the show and not getting the TV stations that aired the program meant I never saw the show for a few years until the release of some episodes on VHS and the feature film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.

Yesterday, I watched Beavis and Butt-Head for the first time in several years. The animation is awful, the stories are stupid and the jokes (if you can call them jokes) are not funny. But I was shocked and appalled when I realized that this show was the perfect example of the MTV generation. A generation that I am a part of (albeit the tail end). Everything screwed up, mindless and stupid with my generation is accurately depicted in the moronic adventures of these two idiots.

I ask you: Is this art imitating life? Or life imitating art? I’d say a little of both. The series creator, Mike Judge, certainly set out to satire the youth of the nineties but one can’t help but think that all he did was make it worse.