America's judge: the creator of "Beavis and Butthead" turns his wit on multicultural liberalism.

WHATEVER THE TYPICAL background might be for an animator and film director, odds are Mike Judge's isn't it. The Ecuadorian-born auteur's searingly satirical insights about contemporary America are all the more remarkable for his life's journey, a winding road that took him from a physics degree at University of California, San Diego to a stint as an engineer then bar-band musician before he taught himself animation using library books. His rise from such improbable origins is even more notable given the intense resistance to his work, from grandstanding U.S. senators and his corporate patrons at Fox.

Despite critical acclaim and commercial success, Judge has opted to live outside of paparazzi circles. The down-to-earth 45-year-old maintains a residence in Austin, Texas, where he conducts himself as a regular guy. A 2006 Esquire interview revealed a stoic, deliberately unassuming type who watches hunting instructional videos, walks around his neighborhood twice a day, frequents his local Starbucks, and "like[s] the suburbs." Like David Lynch, the famously Reaganophilic director of dark comedies such as "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks," Mike Judge has a fundamentally localist, conservative bent imparted on the slant, increasingly in spite of the agendas of the corporate monoliths that release his work.

When MTV introduced "Beavis and Butthead" to its lineup in 1993, it immediately stood out from any other cartoon marketed on a mass level. Its crude figures and equally crude plots typified a nihilist desolation particular to the strip mall and subdivision universe. The protagonists --slow-witted adolescent scions of worn-out single mothers with no clue how to teach these halfwits how to be men--were the natural products of their unnatural habitat.

This was the first show of any sort to address directly such suburbanite childhoods without sentimentality or a misplaced desire to impart moral lessons. A central premise involved the hapless duo's attempts to "score" with "sluts," who were clearly younger versions of their own mothers. Deprived of masculine role models, except for a mouth-breather named Todd, a twenty-something neighborhood thug, Beavis and Butthead were hopeless figures: futureless metalhead high schoolers, divested of any sense of their own histories, ignorant to the core. To compensate for their environmental and genetic handicaps, they did what a generation of throwaway teens did: watched toxic amounts of television. Especially music videos.

Here was incredible humor laden with tragic subtext. Rendering commentary on Black Box and Ugly Kid Joe videos was the closest either got to critical thinking, which suggested that in spite of the obvious, MTV-friendly humor of the show, there was pathos at the heart of "Beavis and Butthead." They were failed by parents, teachers, the community at large. They never had a chance. So they became passive recipients of pop culture--a trope that has recurred in Judge's work throughout the years.

"King of the Hill," Judge's subsequent project, finds an antecedent in Judge's own experience. "I had a paper route that was sort of in a blue-collar neighborhood with lots of Texas transplants, so early on I had these kinds of characters around me," he recalled in a 2006 interview. "[A]fter Beavis and Butthead, I had done a panel cartoon; I just had this image of just four guys with beers standing out in front of the fence, kind of like I used to see when I'd look out my kitchen window, and I just drew them all saying, 'Yep, yep, yep.'"

The early episodes of "King of the Hill" bore considerable resemblance to Judge's first show, down to lead character Hank's voice recycling the previous show's Mr. Anderson. Simple animation and defiantly two-dimensional characterizations made the first few years seem more redneck than recent seasons: Hank's lament about his son--"That boy's not right!"--hasn't surfaced nearly as much in later episodes. Both Hank and his hometown of Arlen have become more "citified."

Like Judge's first show, "King of the Hill" directly addresses the eroded state of American masculinity. Hank's oft-mentioned "narrow urethra" and his eternally complicated relationships with his son and late father, along with the failings of Hank's neighbors and lifelong friends--the cuckold Dale Gribble, the son of a gay rodeo cowboy; the eternally jilted Army barber Bill Dauterive; the mumble-mouthed skirtchaser Boomhauer--flesh out the program's critique of the declining status of the white male in contemporary America. It is no accident that the representative native American--John Redcorn, the biological father of Dale's teenage son--is the show's primary exponent of male virility. Likewise, it is uncoincidental that Arlen's elite is comprised increasingly of southeast Asian immigrants. White people have been superseded, boiled down into the melting pot. There is no "white skin privilege" for these "inconsequential bottom dwellers," as they are called in one episode. The white guys on "King of the Hill" are flawed, ordinary men imbued with sadness--Hank most of all.

Hank exemplifies the Mike Judge everyman, rooted in duty to God, country, and family, to his job, his beloved Arlen, and his Dallas Cowboys. Hank embodies the Texan code: he is a localist of the highest order. He wants the world to stay as it was in his sepia-tinged memory, where Tom Landry is still coaching the Cowboys, where Reagan is still president, and it is always morning in America. But he knows, deep down, it's all lost.

Understanding Hank Hill's traditionalism is key to appreciating the points Judge has made in his two most recent films, the settings of which make Arlen look idyllic.

His 1999 "Office Space" offered a blistering satire of the corporate world in the era of Clintonian "rightsizing." The protagonist, a thirtyish cubicle drone named Peter Gibbons, labors without distinction at a company called Initech, where he is condescended to by his sleazy, Porsche-driving yuppie boss. His personal life is no better: his golddigger girlfriend is as faithful as a feral cat. He works weekends, consumed by constant demands to do scut work like "put new cover sheets on the TPS reports."

As Initech restructures and Gibbons's layoff looms, his girlfriend takes him to a hypnotherapist, who has a heart attack and keels over. The death is treated in the fashion of many of Judge's minor character deaths, as seemingly incidental.

Post hypnotism, though, Gibbons is liberated from the stresses that plagued him when he was a company man. For a while, his story breezes along like "The Secret of My Success." But as so often happens to Judge characters when things go well, Gibbons's newfound confidence metastasizes into a catastrophic hubris when he launches an ill-fated embezzlement scheme with his jettisoned coworkers.

"Office Space" depicts a world far removed from Arlen, Texas, where Hank Hill is able to devote himself unironically to selling "propane and propane accessories." Nonetheless, it is identifiably part of Judge's narrative universe, containing allusions to prior projects. Gibbons, for instance, lives in the Morningwood Apartments--"morning wood" being a central concern of the libidinous Beavis and Butthead.

The final scene depicts an at-ease Gibbons, beatifically working with his redneck neighbor, who would not have been out of place on either of Judge's animated series, reconstructing the Initech building that was burned down by a disgruntled coworker. The redemption in hard, honest work is an ending Hank Hill would have appreciated.

Judge's most recent movie, 2006's "Idiocracy," represents a marked departure in setting and narrative technique, even as the film recapitulates many of the director's earlier themes.

The central character, Private Joe Bowers, is yet another Judge everyman --"the most average soldier in the Army." He is picked, along with a prostitute, to serve as part of a military experiment. The subjects are deposited into coffin-like pods for a deep freeze, with the intention of retrieving them in a year. But as it turns out, the base is decommissioned, a Fuddruckers is built on the grounds, and the experiment is forgotten--until the Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505 liberates Bowers and the streetwalker from their pods into a dystopian mess still called America. Bowers turns out to be the smartest man in the world.

And what a world it is. As the narrator asserts, "the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang and various grunts." The culture has likewise deteriorated, becoming ridiculously coarsened and entirely familiar. Beavis and Butthead would thrive.

A ubiquitous Gatorade ripoff called "Brawndo" abounds, dual-purposed for water fountains and crop irrigation, while the name of the aforementioned Fuddruckers has morphed into a certain scatological variant. Along those lines, Starbucks has addressed its spate of store closings by offering Frappucinos topped with "happy endings." H&R Block likewise has found ways to impart a Triple X ethos into the 1040 form.

The morally bankrupt, subliterate, and subhuman 26th-century society sees law degrees doled out to slackjaws at Costco and justice meted out on the WWE-like "Monday Night Rehab." The modest Methodist churches attended by Christian stoics like Hank Hill? Gone forever, along with the quiet faith contained within and the spiritual quandaries that it addresses. Judge's point is unmistakable. This is where we're headed. And it may not take centuries to get there.

Like all of Judge's work, "Idiocracy" employs deceptively broad, overtly commercial comedy as a framework for incisive critiques of the intense commodification of modern life. Throughout the Judge oeuvre, corporations and government conspire to dumb people down, to keep them mired in unblinking consumerism, to divest them from their natural selves. His protagonists, in light of the existential struggles they face, often seem not heroic so much as Sisyphean hard-luck figures.

It's not yet clear how this thematic tendency will play out in Judge's next project, "The Goode Family," due to launch in March 2009 on ABC. Unlike "King of the Hill," which took aim at small-town culture, "The Goode Family" is a send up of do-gooder white liberal types who shop exclusively at Whole Foods and take Obama's quasi-inspirational rhetoric at face value. The preview available at press time introduces characters like a vegan woman clad in a t-shirt emblazoned with the "Meat is Murder" slogan; a chunky Caucasoid lad--adopted from South Africa because the family apparently wanted a black child--clad in a dashiki and a Mother Africa necklace; and a starved vegan dog. The patriarch of the family, a community-college administrator, is described as "coming from a long line of overeducated liberals." Judge says that the Goodes are people who "feel forever guilty about being a human being on the planet."

In this insipid era of Yes We Did, with the mainstream media pushing a post-racial construction of America, the time is right for skewering the white liberals we all know too well. The open question about Judge's new show isn't whether the artist is up to the task, but whether his new network will let Judge be Judge or try to shoehorn him into an ungainly box that offers neither commercial success nor critical kudos.

A.G. Gancarski writes from Jacksonville, Fla.