Yes, I Know It’s Sick, but Still . . .

Perversity has been present in pop culture for years. So just how sick is some of TV getting? Sick enough that . . .

Comedy Central’s “South Park,” a Wednesday night animated comedy about four third-graders in the snowy Colorado Rockies, makes MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head look like a couple of Republicans. You suspected something a bit lewd of center when the game of choice on the Aug. 13 premiere was “kick the baby.” And when one of the kids erupted in flaming flatulence after getting a mysterious anal probe from outer-space spooks. Aliens--they’ll resort to anything.

As will MTV. Its first real sitcom, a new Wednesday night half hour of low-budget, laid-back Texas lunacy titled “Austin Stories,” makes imbecility seductive, most of its characters having the mental acuity of a bucket of rocks.

And talk about your comedic license: This series is shot throughout Austin, which should sue. Although in many ways a very appealing small city, the state capital and home of the University of Texas comes off here as being mostly the capital of white trash, junky used-car lots and strip malls. At least that’s the primary milieu of the characters.

If you like your TV conventional, don’t bother. However, if you agree with some of us from the darker kingdom that sicker can be healthier--to say nothing of funnier--circle “South Park” in particular, and give the bent “Austin Stories” a try too.

“Austin Stories” locates untraditional humor in the regular screw-ups of three friends, underplayed by young stand-up comics who use their real names here, their absence of acting gloss nourishing their appeal. The likable characters hang out in a place called Hernandez Cafe. By far the brightest of the trio is Laura House, a caustic dumpling of a reporter for a weekly newspaper. Last week she was tormented by an illiterate stalker who misspelled “Satan” as “satin.”

The two guys are on a fast track to loserdom. Lowest on the food chain is hapless Brad “Chip” Pope, who quotes “Doogie Howser” and gets fired from menial job after menial job. Last week he formed a band (including a lead fork player) whose other misfit members ended up kicking him out. Two weeks ago, his fear of smelling like diapers nearly drove him mad. Tonight he becomes the leader of a tiny cult of black-lipped, chalky looking doomsday children.

The other guy is Howard Kremer, a transplanted Easterner, ladies’ man and shameless hustler who has no place of residence, job or prospects but plenty of get-pocket-change-fast schemes that inevitably fail, including selling chocolate he finds in dumpsters and selling city maps available free from the Chamber of Commerce.

Although said to be fully scripted, “Austin Stories” has the feeling of improv and a minimalist style that grows on you. Its writing is often subtle, its laughs mostly minor but consistent, its weirdness alluring.

“Austin Stories” and “South Park” are both probably acquired tastes.

A first sampling of the truly renegade “South Park” brings on instant revulsion, for example. Your first instinct is to hit the remote fast and get out of there. Yet be patient and don’t despair, for only after extended exposure do you begin to comprehend and appreciate the full wondrous extent of its depravity.

This is not to undersell Beavis and Butt-head, who still have their moments. As in an episode aired earlier this month in which that moron Beavis, after standing rapt before a whirring electric saw, finally gave into temptation--you could see it coming--and thrust his finger into the blade. Heh-heh, heh-heh, oh-oh-oh, heh-heh, oh-oh.

He got the finger sewed back on.

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Even more than MTV’s dynamic duhs, though, “South Park” is seamlessly disgusting, opening each rewarding week with its Pac Man-sized little squirts (the voices of series creators Trey Parker, 27, and Matt Stone, 26) awaiting their school bus in rural South Park. Just adorable. But when one screeched to another on the premiere, “Go home, you little dildo,” you knew this wasn’t “Peanuts.”

South Park Elementary pupils Stan, Kyle, Kenny and obscene, foul-mouthed, bigoted, anti-Semitic Cartman (whose voice alone defines repugnance) drive the plots. Other regular characters are a school bus driver with a five-word vocabulary (“Shut up and sit down!”), an incompetent teacher who speaks through his hand-puppet alter ego (“We treat star athletes better ‘cause they’re better people”) and a kindly basso school chef (voiced by Isaac Hayes), who doubles as the grade school’s football coach and at one point instructs the little tykes: “You want to hold your football like you would your lover.”

In the latter episode, the inept South Park Cows faced the powerhouse Middle Park Cowboys on the football field, ultimately hoping not to win but to beat the betting spread.

Take it from a big fan, “South Park” is clearly not for everyone, especially young kids, something that Comedy Central makes clear by running it at 10 p.m. with a mature-audience-only TV-MA rating buttressed by an (L) for coarse language. How coarse? The four episodes that I’ve seen included a hint of bestiality (ho-hum) and self-mocking slurs against Jews, blacks and some nationalities (“Genetic engineering lets us correct God’s horrible, horrible mistakes, like German people”).

One of those episodes featured the attempted mating of an elephant with a pot-bellied pig in hopes of creating a pot-bellied elephant. Another found “South Park” examining the issue of assisted suicide with customary delicacy. When Stan rejected his 103-year-old prune of a grandfather’s pleas that he kill him, the old man replied: “Why not? I killed my grandpa when I was your age.” Ultimately, the Grim Reaper himself intervened.

That episode also had South Park parents protesting the Cartoon Central network for airing a popular kids’ program whose two foppish characters, Terrence and Phillip, do little more on the air than noisily break wind.

“South Park” was at its own clamorous best in an episode (being rerun tonight) in which Stan’s dog, Sparky, began doing unmentionable things to other male dogs off camera. Then when Sparky showed up wearing a pink bandanna, the secret was out. Cartman: “That dog’s a homo! That dog’s a homo!”

No, you weren’t in Kansas anymore.

The segment’s hilariously defining voice was the lisping owner of Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Animal Sanctuary, “the one place where gay animals can really be themselves.” Naturally, it included a disco.

For all its outward degeneracy, “South Park” also has undercurrents of morality. The Big Gay Al episode, for example, preached acceptance in its own twisted way. Comedy Central says that it brought overwhelmingly positive responses from viewers who identified themselves as gay and that “South Park” generally has received much less criticism than anticipated, given the show’s distinctive raunchiness.

“South Park” is now in reruns, with three of six coming new episodes designed for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Saying it’s Comedy Central’s most-watched original series ever, the cable network has ordered 13 additional episodes for 1998, affirming that sick sells.

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* “South Park” airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on cable’s Comedy Central. The network has rated it TV-MA-L (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17 because of coarse language).

* “Austin Stories” airs Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. on cable’s MTV. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).