“It all makes me think, as you might expect, of Beavis and Butthead. You know: the funny dudes. The smart one and the less smart one. Butthead’s the smart one. You can tell he is by the way Beavis defers to him. Butthead mostly likes to destroy things. He doesn’t seem to know how to turn willful destruction into personal profit, so I guess this means that he isn’t the world’s smartest man, but Beavis sure seems to think he is. Beavis is the less smart one. He thinks anything Butthead says is great. He laughs at all of Butthead’s jokes, which are mostly repeated catchphrases and lowest common denominator stuff, and he even laughs at some things that Butthead says that are not jokes, at which point Butthead has to tell him to shut up. Crucially Butthead is the smart one because Beavis finds him smart. To Beavis, Butthead is the smartest and funniest man in the world. Everybody else thinks Butthead is a tiresome ignorant socially maladapted fool, and they think this because that is what Butthead is. It strikes me that every Butthead needs a Beavis. Without Beavis, Butthead would be left with nothing but the opinion of everybody else. And it strikes me that Twitter is full of Beavises, all ready to tell the world’s smartest man that everything he does is epic and hilarious, even though he can’t actually think of anything smart to do or anything funny to say. So that’s interesting.”
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The World’s Smartest Man Doesn’t Want You to Read This on Twitter
Chef’s kiss.
