Mike Judge is the poet laureate of my generation.

Make all the jokes and comments (and "yeah - fire" quotes) you want, but from the cultural awareness of Beavis and Butthead and Office Space, to the empathy of King of the Hill, and the prescience of Idiocracy (and yes, I'm skipping tons of other legendary work) - you have to admit: nobody has described the last 40 years of Americana like him. Including what we lost.

This post is a look back on an early moment.

The YouTube algorithm recommended this to me the other day.

We used to watch TV together. Remember?

Not that we still don't - I spend a ton of time doing a variation on this with my wife, to everything from sports to Tiny Desk concerts where we self-narrate what's going on, but it was a more widespread activity.

Live tweeting and watch parties - I'm talking virtual only here - were supposed to help replace this stuff. They kind of did, but they also lost some of the magic.

In the land of Beavis and Butthead, MTV told them what was cool, and they performed what was cool to each other.

It's a type of meta commentary, crystallized magnificently by Mike Judge, from a pre-social media world where idiot friends with idiot opinions would consume culture without any performative value or awareness.

This is key. The performance, no matter how bad or ill-informed or unearned, was for an audience of one.

Friend to friend. Pure social medium. No plural.

I know it still happens. See my example above. But the clip reminds me how different it was, and even if we are mocking the unearned numbskulledness of the MTV generation, there's a beauty to it.

So yes, laugh at this clip. It’s dumb and funny and old. Plus, Shaq.

But also, think about what made this experience valuable.

Not everything needs an audience, because not everything deserves an audience.

Where there are anti-scaling properties, there's a scene.

Even if it's just two bozos on a couch - like Beavis and Butthead, or me and my wife, or you and who knows who.

Do more of this.