Pop Culture : Just Boys of Civilization Destroyers? : Say what you will about the moronic duo, they’ve helped to cement MTV’s identity with viewers and advertisers : COMMENTARY

“Beavis and Butt-head” is a cutting-edge example of a profound change taking place in television’s relationship to its audience.

If you haven’t seen the MTV series, imagine a rather primitive cartoon with two messy teen-age boys reveling in a TV-inspired urge to mud-wrestle gorgeous females. Picture two social misfits who spend their time commenting grossly on rock videos and getting into trouble--maiming animals, getting sent to the principal’s office, harassing a neighbor, wreaking havoc with a buzz saw, peeking into vans at the drive-in.

Accompanying their activities are “huh-huh” grunting, phrases like “it sucks” and leering sexual innuendo--a nonstop parade of what most parents and other authority figures consider highly objectionable in “adolescent” behavior. A person who has grown up with the program traditions of a three-network world can’t help but mutter, “They wouldn’t allow that on ABC, CBS, NBC or even Fox.”

That is the distinction MTV is clearly trying to sell to the young adults and adolescents who make up its target audience. The broadcast networks generally still want viewers to know that they pursue broad cultural consensus on their airwaves. Cable planners, on the other hand, increasingly hope video pilgrims will see them as creating space for narrower cultural communities that deserve a loyalty they don’t grant to “regular” TV. With episodes that appear at both ends of MTV’s prime-time schedule, “Beavis and Butt-head” signals MTV’s image of community in an unusual way: by both exploiting and undermining a key television tradition.

The tradition is that of the comic fool. A veritable menagerie of stupid characters has paraded across the home tube over the decades. Among the most memorable are sewer worker Ed Norton (“The Honeymooners”), beatnik Maynard G. Krebs (“Dobie Gillis”), Marine Gomer Pyle (“Gomer Pyle”), taxi driver “Reverend” Jim Ignatowski (“Taxi”) and bartenders Coach and Woody (“Cheers”).

Of course, the theatrical use of fools predates television. Since before Shakespeare, their function has often been to ridicule social conventions and taunt authority figures. And, in fact, Maynard G. Krebs’ quiet encouragement of Dobie’s slothful side and his fearful hiccuping of the word “work” every time someone uttered it undercut the standard middle-class ambitions that pervade the late ‘50s sitcom. Similarly, when Gomer Pyle’s honest bumbling bumped up against the hard-nosed demands of military superiors, it was they who ended up looking most silly.

As these examples suggest, the tweaking of authority by television’s fools has actually been quite mild. Federal oversight, advertiser caution and omnipresent monitoring by advocacy groups have made ABC, CBS and NBC programmers quite skittish when taunting established ways of society. Even in the late 1960s, one of the most contentious periods in recent American history, the clowns of “Laugh-In” and “The Smothers Brothers” had a difficult time enlarging the envelope of social and political criticism.

Today, despite stark declines in network audience shares compared to decades past, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox remain guided toward only mildly controversial fools. In fact, with the exception of Fox’s subtly subversive “Married . . . With Children,” the few prime-time dunces on the four broadcast networks are, like Joey in “Blossom,” stock idiots evacuated of any larger social import.

Enter MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head. In some ways, their terrain is similar to broadcast territory. A spot on Army recruiting, for example, recalls skits on military indoctrination by Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the cast of “F-Troop.” Similarly, an incident in which Beavis and Butt-head behave obnoxiously in school picks up on themes that go back to “Our Miss Brooks” and “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

At their heart, though, the Beavis and Butt-head versions do not belong to broadcast TV. They find their spirit, their sense of moral uprootedness and anarchistic glee, in cultural products for adolescents and young adults that float outside broadcasting’s main stream: in such off-center film fare as “Wayne’s World” and “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” in “Ren and Stimpy,” Nickelodeon cable’s warp-drive version of a Loony Toon; and, above all, in enthusiastically libidinous animated films such as “Fritz the Cat” and underground print cartoons such as “Zap Comix “ and “Twisted Sisters.”

Through the aggressively stupid sexuality and violence of its characters, then, “Beavis and Butt-head” acts as a marker. In the role of MTV’s prime-time bookends, their series tags its channel with a diffident broadcast personality designed to resonate with the adolescents and young adults that MTV’s programmers and advertisers seek to embrace. Pressure-group anger, far from endangering the show and its image, would probably reinforce it.

As multimedia channels continue to proliferate, the longstanding idea of TV as bringing together and defining a national community is giving way to a notion of many islands of viewing that dub themselves separate and special.

In the 500-channel universe that futurists are predicting, what will these competitive communities mean for the way people see themselves, others and the nation as a whole? Obnoxious though it may be, “Beavis and Butt-head” should be viewed as an early development in this partitioning process--and as an introduction to the complex issues that the spread of video communities might raise.