Beavis and Butt-Head vs. White Privilege Theory

In 1937, Boris Orman was working at a bakery in Russia when he shared a joke over tea with his colleague.

“Stalin was out swimming, but he began to drown. A peasant who was passing by jumped in and pulled him safely to shore,” the joke went, according to British writer Jonathan Waterlow. “Stalin asked the peasant what he would like as a reward. Realising whom he had saved, the peasant cried out: ‘Nothing! Just please don’t tell anyone I saved you!’”

The joke is hardly the funniest ever told, but Orman was nevertheless one of countless Russians in the Soviet Union who received a 10-year stint in a labor camp for uttering the jibe. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, got off a bit easier. He received a mere eight-year sentence in the Gulag after Soviet authorities intercepted a letter he wrote to a friend in 1945 that made a crack about Stalin and criticized the Soviet system.

One might be tempted to think the Soviets just had really bad senses of humor, but there’s a reason totalitarians and authoritarians seek to suppress jokes.

History shows humor is a tool that empowers. It can fortify humans during dark and deadly times, and it can destroy an idea just as effectively as reason, though it’s arguably most powerful when it’s combined with reason.

The most famous such example might be Jonathan Swift’s classic essay A Modest Proposal, a masterpiece of satire that exposed the impoverished conditions of the time by saying poor Irish families could alleviate their condition by selling their excess children to rich people for food.

Combining humor with pointed social commentary is a strategy employed by countless comedians—old and new—including Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Dave Chappelle, and Bill Burr.

Which brings me to Mike Judge.

Judge, a writer, animator, and director, is probably best known for Beavis and Butt-Head, an animated show that ran on MTV in the 1990s and was turned into a feature film, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, released in 1996.

Since then, Beavis and Butt-Head have mostly been retired, as Judge turned to numerous other projects, including Office Space (1999), Idiocracy (2006), and the HBO hit show Silicon Valley (2014-2019). But Beavis and Butt-head—a pair of metal head morons who snicker at childish things and make crass observations about “babes” and “scoring”—are back.

In 2022, a new Beavis and Butt-Head movie came out, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe.

The premise sounds silly—especially when Beavis and Butt-Head rehash the same crude jokes and antics from 30 years earlier (“I am Cornholio; I need TP for my bunghole”)—but that was precisely what made the movie appealing to audiences.

“This is one of the stupidest concepts for a Beavis and Butthead movie I can imagine,” one YouTube commenter said. “It’s perfect.”

Not all the jokes were rehashed, however. The movie also explored a theme Beavis and Butt-Head audiences in the 1990s had never heard of: white privilege. One scene showed Beavis and Butt-Head in college learning about “white privilege” from a professor.

“This is a classic case of white privilege,” the instructor explains. “And you both have it.”

The duo had no idea what white privilege is, but several members of their class were kind enough to explain it to them.

“So, white privilege is when people, particularly men, automatically assume they can take whatever they want,” one young woman explains.

“And they never have to worry about getting stopped by the police,” another chimes in.

“And they have the inside track for any jobs …”

You get the idea. The funniest part of the clip is that, unlike most people, Beavis and Butt-head are not offended or ashamed when they hear this. They are excited.

“Whoa,” Butt-head says. “And we have that?”

“You sure do,” the professor answers.

Naturally, Beavis and Butt-head decide to use this newly-discovered power, but things don’t go as planned.

For those less familiar with white privilege, it’s just one aspect of a larger intellectual movement known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). Prominent thinkers have explained at length why CRT is a dangerous and damaging philosophy, one that undermines individuality, fosters a victimhood mindset, and divides along racial lines instead of uniting us in our common humanity.

Making the philosophical case against CRT is important, but I don’t think I’ve seen a single scholarly article or lecture expose white privilege and its talking points as effectively as Mike Judge did in that two-minute Beavis and Butt-head clip.

Which brings me back to the power of humor.

Satire and humor still have the power to destroy ideas, perhaps more than ever. This is precisely why comedians like Dave Chappelle and sites like The Babylon Bee in recent years were targets of the woke movement, which spent a great deal of energy working to suppress speech that violates its dogmas on race, gender, and class.

Fortunately, today’s commentators in America don’t face prison sentences like Boris Orman and Alexander Solzhenitsyn did—or like many Europeans do today—when they make jokes criticizing the ascendant orthodoxy, but they still face risks.

A version of this article first appeared on FEE.org.