TELEVISION; Keeping Beavis and Butt-head Just Stupid Enough

Mike Judge is demanding, but in a relaxed, zero-affect kind of way. He is doing the final check on an episode of "Beavis and Butt-head" that is scheduled to run the next week. The sound mix is bad, and an important bit of dialogue can't be heard over the track of a music video.

" 'Shut up, Beavis!' isn't loud enough," Mr. Judge complains to the show's producer, John Andrews, in a voice that is too disengaged to sound really disturbed. Mr. Andrews immediately agrees to have the show remixed, and that, too, produces no appreciable response. But then Mr. Judge sees Beavis and Butt-head reappear on the screen and do something profoundly stupid. Their creator gives a long, low-pitched chuckle, and in it one can hear echoes of the now-famous rhythm:

Huh, huh, huh. Huh, huh, huh. Cool.

Every few years a show comes along that connects with some dark urge in the adolescent unconscious and becomes almost immediately a force in popular culture. After less than six months on the air, MTV's "Beavis and Butt-head" seems to be such a show. The delinquent duo already have their own line of marketing paraphernalia, including, of course, underwear. They have been taken up by David Letterman, who quotes them liberally. Their first book is coming out next month. A movie seems inevitable.

All this from a guy who, by all appearances, can't even draw.

Thirty years old, with a receding hairline that takes some of the edge off his youthfulness, Mr. Judge oversees the spread of "Beavis and Butt-head" from his office at MTV's headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The office has the still-moving-in look of an off-campus apartment. The only decoration is a laminated copy of Rolling Stone's recent "Beavis and Butt-head" cover, which turned out to be the magazine's best-selling issue of the last year. Mr. Judge's desk is strewn with assorted scripts, fan letters and sticky yellow notes, including one from a staff member that reads: "I want to show you a couple of urinating revisions."

Urinating, along with other bodily functions, is a big part of the action on "Beavis and Butt-head." The two spend a lot of time picking their noses, dropping their trousers and having -- or at least talking about having -- erections. They also like to light things on fire, torture small animals, and, in a supremely self-reflexive gesture, sit around watching music videos. They look at the world in simple -- very simple -- terms: either something is "cool" or it "sucks." They are very, very stupid.

"If I wanted to read, I'd go to school," Butt-head says in response to a video that features printed words.

"Beavis and Butt-head" is MTV's highest-rated show, and some commentators have taken this as final proof of society's degeneration. "The downward spiral of the living white male surely ends here," John Leland recently opined in Newsweek.

Mr. Judge doesn't buy such heavy social critiques, but he doesn't seem too disturbed by them, either. "I think 'Geraldo' 's a little more scary," he said. Beavis and Butt-head, he maintains, at least have a certain optimism. "They're pretty positive," he said. "Even when they say things suck, they're having a good time."

Ten days ago, though, it became a little harder to accentuate the positive side of the characters. After a 5-year-old in Ohio set his family's mobile home on fire, killing his baby sister, his mother publicly blamed the show, saying it had taught her son to play with fire. This prompted MTV to announce that it was "re-examining issues regarding 'Beavis and Butt-Head' " and to cancel an appearance Mr. Judge had planned to make on Mr. Letterman's show.

Beavis and Butt-head -- Butt-head, the brunet, is the leader of the two, though perhaps leader is too strong a word -- live in an unnamed, medium-size city, not unlike Albuquerque, N.M., where Mr. Judge grew up. They like heavy metal and disdain what they call "college music," which has too many lyrics. Both in their musical taste and their world view, they have clear generic ties to Wayne and Garth, but the protagonists of "Wayne's World" look, by comparison, downright literate. As many have remarked, Bart Simpson now looks like an overachiever.

"I like 'Beavis and Butt-head,' " said Matt Groening, who created "The Simpsons." "Anything that takes the heat off Bart Simpson being responsible for the downfall of western civilization."

Beavis and Butt-head look like the kind of cartoons you might find scrawled on the inside of a high school locker. They are drawn with purposeful crudeness and their motions have the jerky, seasick quality of marionettes. Mr. Judge is constantly on guard against creeping "cartoonization." In one episode, for example, he decided that a character's mouth looked too much like what you would find in a Walt Disney movie and insisted it be changed.

Mr. Judge taught himself animation while working as a bass player in a blues band in Dallas. His first short film, "Office Space," about a guy who is pushed around by his boss, was a modest success at animation festivals two years ago. Still, Mr. Judge, who graduated with a physics degree from the University of California at San Diego, was considering becoming a math teacher when a higher calling intervened.

Mr. Judge thought up "Beavis and Butt-head" while casting around for something to enter in a festival of "sick and twisted" cartoons. Butt-head's prototype already existed in an old notebook. "I was trying to draw a guy I went to high school with," he explained. "It didn't really look like him, but I thought it was funny anyway, so I kept drawing it like that. I thought, what if I just completely cut loose and made it really awful?"

The result was the first "Beavis and Butt-head" animated adventure, titled "Frog Baseball." (The title provides a complete description of the plot.) Mr. Judge not only drew the whole thing but also provided both voices (and still does). MTV bought the little film for its "Liquid Television" program, then decided to make it into a half-hour series. The original order was for 35 episodes. Mr. Judge was a little taken aback. "I was thinking, 'I can't even think of one more thing these guys could do,' " he said.

Coming up new stupid things for Beavis and Butt-head to do, though, has been easier than Mr. Judge thought. The pair's recent adventures include tossing a poodle into a washing machine, deep-frying a telephone and posing questions to President Clinton at a high school assembly. (Butt-head asks why the President doesn't "invent some country and light it on fire.")

Each episode includes two cartoon adventures and several music videos. Currently, 45 cartoons have been completed, and 15 more are almost done. MTV has already ordered up 130 more episodes for 1994, although some of the old adventures will be recycled in the new episodes.

The success of the show has certainly changed Mr. Judge's circumstances, though he insists the change is not quite so dramatic as people have made out because he had to sell MTV the rights to the characters. He now lives in Westchester County -- he declined to be more specific -- with his wife, Francesca, and 2-year-old daughter, Julia.

The animation for "Beavis and Butt-head" is done, according to Mr. Judge's specifications, partly by a team of animators in New York and partly by another team in Korea. When he is not in his office reviewing scripts or rough cuts of the show, Mr. Judge is likely to be found at a sound studio on Tenth Avenue doing the voice-overs. Watching him do this is a wondrous thing. A vaguely malevolent glint enters his eyes, and the corners of mouth slip back into a parody of a grin. "Huh, huh, huh. Huh, huh, huh. Cool."

Many of Mr. Judge's fellow humorists seem to admire Beavis and Butt-head for their unwavering stupidity. Mr. Letterman recently said on the air that he prized the "purity" of their grossness. Similarly, Mark Alan Stamaty, whose "Washingtoon" comic strip deals with the kind of political issues Beavis and Butt-head remain blissfully ignorant of, said: "You don't look to something like this for moral guidance. But there's a kind of pure, intuitive humor about it that I appreciate."

One of the real challenges of the show, according to Mr. Judge, has been to make sure that Beavis and Butt-head never disappoint their fans by falling out of character. One script, for example, had Beavis receiving a special school pass and saying that the other students would suffer from "Beavis envy." The line had to be cut: It was too close to sounding clever.