The New York Times: Men at Work - Finding Humor in Missteps

By Dennis Lim
The New York Times
Excerpt
August 27, 2009

EVEN as a boy the filmmaker and animator Mike Judge had a hard time suspending disbelief when it came to the economic lives of fictional characters. "I remember just being annoyed when it seemed that everyone had endless cash and never had to work, while I always had lots of jobs," he recalled in a telephone interview. His sister's Nancy Drew books, in which the teenage heroine was forever jetting off to far-flung locations, were a particular source of irritation. "I'd say, 'Where did she get the money for the plane ticket?' "

When Mr. Judge, 46, became a professional storyteller, this pet peeve developed from a literal-minded fixation into a sociological curiosity about the ways in which work runs our lives and shapes our identities.

"There are a lot of movies that show what people do for a living, but they're detectives or assassins or high-end drug lords," he said. "Maybe people are afraid the other stuff is boring. But I feel it's always interesting to find out about a character through their job."

Mr. Judge's animated series "King of the Hill," set to conclude its 13-season run on Fox next month, frequently delves into the work environments of its characters (including the no-nonsense hero, Hank Hill, a Texas propane salesman, and his wife, Peggy, a substitute Spanish teacher). And so did "Beavis and Butt-head," the MTV cartoon that put Mr. Judge on the map, in which the two cretinous teenage antiheroes are unaccountably employed by the fast-food chain Burger World...

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