The Tao of Beavis and Butthead (1999)

Back in the early 90s, when I first began teaching writing courses as a graduate student in Washington University's English Department, I used to try to stay connected to the popular culture world that my students inhabited. It was always useful to be able to refer to movies they had seen or music they liked when we were discussing books like Twain's Life on the Mississippi or Welty's One Writer's Beginnings or Nabokov's Speak, Memory. I was less than a decade removed from high school myself, but it already required some concerted effort to bridge the growing distance between us.

That's how I became, rather improbably, a fan of the MTV cartoon Beavis and Butthead. One of my students would wear a B & B t-shirt to class sometimes, and a couple of them could mimic their heh-hehs. (Not exactly endearing themselves to their fellow students, it seemed.) I expected to watch no more than an episode or two before dismissing the show as hopelessly stupid (as various pundits were already doing), but the more I watched, the more I laughed, and the more I laughed, the more I watched. The main characters were every bit as dumb as advertised, but the cartoon itself proved far funnier and smarter than I had expected.

When I mentioned my new favorite show to some fellow Ph. D.-pursuing friends, they responded with equal parts surprise and scorn, shocked that I would waste time on something so worthless. The Reedie in me was not about to let such a brazen assault on my tastes go unriposted, so I ended up writing this essay and submitting it around to a few places before it landed at Popular Culture Review. The editor said he liked the essay quite a lot, but he couldn't publish it without some short of scholarly apparatus, so I added some quotations from Plato, Calvino, and Nabokov (the subject of my recent dissertation), tacked on a bare bones list of sources cited, and voilá -- it was accepted for "scholarly" publication. (Though not especially well copy-edited, as the printer's mistake on the first page shows.)

Over the decades, I've shared the essay with several folks who seemed likely to get a grin out of it too. And I'm very pleased and grateful to note that Brenda loved B & B as much as I did long before we ever met, so she required no convincing at all. :)

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