Discovering King of the Hill

NOTE: This is all well and good, but immediately prior to this is a critique of John Williams’s career that I really poured myself into, so if you only read one thing on this blog today, skip back one and check it out. Sorry I posted both on the same day.

Over the course of this class I encountered King of the Hill for the first time. It may not be fair to say the absolute first time, because I’ve come across it before, but I’ve never really paid it much attention. I grew up hating Beavis and Butthead – I’m not sure if that’s because I wasn’t allowed to see it or because I was an elitist fop as an eight-year-old. It’s probably a little of both. At any rate, I hated Beavis and Butthead, and seeing Mike Judge’s name on something else didn’t exactly thrill me. Moreover, the show was set in Texas and while I’ve always appreciated the chance to gently deride the culture in which I grew up, I wasn’t really sure that I could stand being saturated in it that deeply for thirty minutes every week. I guess that the other thing is, there’s a fine line between satire and glorification. (Jeff Foxworthy used to walk that line pretty well.) I never could tell which side of the line King of the Hill fell on, and again, I never really felt any compelling reason to look into it.

Then I started noticing Mike Judge doing things that were cool. I still haven’t seen Idiocracy, but nearly every friend I have who watched it has greatly enjoyed it. He teamed up with Don Hertzfeldt for The Animation Show, garnering my respect not only for giving unknown animators a chance to shine, but for working with Don Hertzfeldt, whom I adore. I was starting to warm up to the guy just a little.

Then in class, when we were asked to bring clips from a TV show that we thought was funny, a classmate brought a clip from King of the Hill where Bobby, the son, chooses to study martial arts by taking women’s self-defense classes. There, he learns to scream things like “That’s my purse! I don’t know you!” and kick people in the groin. His diligence in shouting the things he was told to shout in class creates some beautiful non-sequitur moments, and let’s face it – kicking people in the groin is funny. I think that it may have won me over, at least enough for me to give it a closer look. I haven’t yet checked out the King of the Hill DVDs for lack of time, but I fully expect to soon.