Beavis and Butthead.

FOR over ten years the message of MTV has been, in essence, "Peace, Love, and Naked Surfing." Even before the term Political Correctness entered common parlance, MTV was the epitome of it. Thus it must have come as a surprise to the network's top brass that the most successful program in their history is Beavis and Butthead, which lavishes contempt on everything for which they have seemed to stand.

I like Beavis and Butthead. I liked them from the first time I channel-surfed into their airspace and stilled the habitual restlessness of my thumb long enough to see what they were about. Crudely drawn cartoon adolescents, the blond-haired Beavis and the brown-haired Butthead are neither intelligent nor glamorous nor attractive. To be blunt about it, they are a pair of scrawny, pencil-necked nerds. The raspy-voiced Beavis always sits to the right of the irritatingly nasal Butthead, who is a little more intelligent and has marginally more class. Usually planted before a TV, Butthead faces us frontally while Beavis turns toward him, explicitly acknowledging Butthead's superiority.

Most of their time is spent watching MTV and making inane comments in voice-over about the videos that we see on-screen. "If Debbie Gibson and Tiffany got into a fight," Beavis asks Butthead as one of Tiffany's smarmy videos comes on, "who do you think would win?"

That prompts Beavis to observe: "This is mall music. This music s---s. I hate things that s---. I only like things that are cool." As their comments reveal, they inhabit a Manichaean world ruled not by good and evil but by what's cool and what s---s. If something is more than good, such as a certain heavy-metal band, then it "rules," as in "Metallica rules!"

You wouldn't expect that much vitality could be gotten out of an active vocabulary no larger than that of a cash-machine, minus the grammar. And yet Beavis and Butthead contains some of the most authentic and oddly provocative dialogue on the air-waves. Butthead, for example, describes one singer in a video as "a lipstick-wearing, whining w---." Then he wonders aloud: "Hey, Beavis, do you think that if I sang like a w--- I could get some chicks?"

Beavis: "Well, you look like a w---."

Butthead (menacingly): "Shut up, Beavis."

Beavis: "And you talk like a w---."

Butthead: "And I'll kick your a-- like a w--- if you don't shut up."

When not watching MTV, the pair lead a thoroughly middle-class existence in Suburbia, divided between a high school where they learn nothing and jobs at a pizza joint where they do nothing. You never see either of them without the other, and parents or siblings are nowhere to be found. Except for one another, Beavis and Butthead have no one in the world, and they are united against the world. But aside from sticking a firecracker in a frog's mouth, they are not so much evil as irredeemably rotten. To be evil would require a grandeur of soul totally at odds with the pettiness of their nature. This paltriness is in its way incorruptible.

In successive episodes, they encounter feminists, white trash, high-school administrators, lawyers--even the CIA. And yet, no one can reach them or correct them. It is the delight of their creator, Mike Judge, to place them in circumstances calculated to provoke their contempt. In one episode, their infinitely patient, sandal-wearing hippie of a home-room teacher decides that it is time they get in touch with their "feminine side." He assigns them books (by "w----s"?) whose point they completely miss and which they laugh to scorn. In another episode, by purest accident, they are placed in an advanced class, in which a soulful young woman endeavors to teach them the joys of haiku-writing. The results are not much better.

In a typical episode, the principal of their high school sends them, together with other erring students, on one of those "Scared Straight" programs, where inmates are supposed to frighten them into seeing why they should stay out of prison. One inmate shows them his glass eye and peg leg. But instead of getting scared, they are impressed by his coolness. When they are put in a cell with two middle-aged deviant types, Beavis notices that one of them has a tattoo proclaiming "Iron Maiden," a heavy-metal band. "Maiden rules!" Butthead declares. By the time the warden comes to check up on them, he finds all four singing "I'm a Free Man," as they frantically strum their air guitars. He tells the adolescents it's time to go.

Beavis: "No way!"

Butthead: "That s---s!" As Butthead leaves, making the sign of the devil, he turns to the inmates: "You guys are cool! If we ever get back here, we'll have to party again."

After they're gone, one inmate turns to the others: "You know something.? I think we'll see those boys again."

The humor of Beavis and Butthead is subtle and intangible. Either you respond or you don't. I am not certain what the demographics are, but in my experience, women tend to be entirely unamused. One thing is certain: you simply cannot like Beavis and Butthead and also like most of what MTV represents.

The executives at the network seem to accept that they are being laughed at, and in true show-biz fashion, they swallow their pride long enough to rake in the money, largely ignoring the criticism that the show has occasioned. Because, for example, a deranged youngster set his on fire on account of something he saw on Beavis and Butthead, the program has been assailed by certain mirthless people as exemplifying everything that is wrong with an overly violent nation served by unscrupulous networks. Though MTV agreed to show the program only after the kiddies' bedtime, the show gets more air time than ever. Only recently MTV had its first Beavis and Butthead Marathon, in which all the past episodes were run one after another.

Beavis and Butthead taps into a far more complicated sensibility than it is in the power of polls and pundits to express. I would guess that very few of those who tune in really endorse the message of violence, stupidity, and selfishness which, at one level, Beavis and Butthead seems to enshrine. Rather, they respond intuitively to its irony, to its attack not on liberal ideals so much as on the posturings of many who claim to uphold those ideals and who, in the very act of posturing, often betray them. It is for this irony that I, together with millions of other Americans, like Beavis and Butthead.

Mr. Gardner writes frequently about art for NR His book Culture or Trash? was published in January by Birch Lane.