Stupidity knows no generational boundary, as “Beavis and Butt-head” proves with the 22 15-minute episodes and one half-hour episode that make up Season 9 (Paramount Plus). In last summer’s movie “Beavis and Butt-head Do the Universe,” the boys jumped from the Nineties to present day. Although they’ll always be associated with Gen-X and the “It’s cool to not care” decade, Season 9 proves they are timeless.
The world has gotten measurably dumber since the Nineties, but the work of the 12 writers (some of whom return from 2011’s oddball Season 8, where the boys jump unaged to 2011 without explanation) has gotten collectively sharper, even without series creator Mike Judge penning a single episode.
Smart stupidity
The standout is David Javerbaum’s “Home Aide,” a brilliant closed-loop sendup of the welfare state. Following twisted logic on par with Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” this episode finds Beavis working as Butt-head’s home aide when Butt-head needs his apartment cleaned and Beavis needs money. The state pays them to do what they’d do anyway.
This is one of a handful of “Old Beavis and Old Butt-head” episodes, set in the original timeline where they continued to age. These episodes tend to be more depressing, because B&B have passed that point where their immaturity is funny in and of itself.
However, I laugh more than I cry. In much of Season 9 – in both timelines – B&B’s stupidity is so extreme that it’s smart in a way. Certainly, the writing is smart in order to maximize the dumbness of these premises.
In “Time Travelers,” they are moronic enough to believe they are traveling through time by crossing into a new time zone. But their off-target imaginations about how time travel works is ingenious in a dimwitted way.
And “Home Aide’s” Javerbaum delivers another gem in “Freaky Friday,” when B&B assume they’ve switched bodies with each other. As such, we have Beavis thinking he’s Butt-head, even though he’s Beavis, and Butt-head thinking he’s Beavis, even though he’s Butt-head. This is an almost poetic level of idiocy.
Growing old, not up
The humor goes beyond the boys being dumb. Similar to how “The Simpsons” changes Homer’s intelligence level for the needs of the episode, Butt-head is sometimes philosophical and Beavis is sometimes an Everyman. In “The Doppelganger,” viewers sympathize with Beavis’ plight as he’s stuck with an overly friendly guy and can’t find a good moment to make his departure.
Season 9 has fun with character-based “What ifs,” most hilariously when Butt-head – accurately diagnosed as a sociopath — goes on a Ritalin-type pill and is perfectly pleasant to his couch-sharing friend. “Weird Girl,” meanwhile, gives me a premise I’ve always wanted: A girl honest-to-god likes Beavis. He blows it, of course, but there’s a silver lining: He never realized he liked her in the first place, so he doesn’t know he missed out.
“Two Stupid Men” makes a case that you can just stick B&B in a familiar narrative (“12 Angry Men” here) and things will naturally spiral into absurdity. Episodes like these are obvious, anticipatory pleasures.
One more thing makes Season 9 a blast: The pull-away segments now find the boys making fun of YouTube clips. Suggesting that “B&B” gives slightly more attention to character than it used to, we see them both fall in love with a New Zealand gal who can eat 10 Big Macs in one sitting.
Attention to character isn’t the same as character growth, as the “Old B&B” installments remind us. And every episode hits the reset button anyway; if they’re clinically deceased at the end of one episode, that’s not a problem for the next one. But if continued creativity is the measuring stick, “Beavis and Butt-head” is far from dead. Whenever these writers come up with a couple dozen more things to make fun of, bring on Season 10.