Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”
Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.
He lampooned modern workplace culture in the movies Extract and Office Space, while his superlative sitcom about the tech world, Silicon Valley, managed to make comedy out of the wealthiest and most influential industry in our era. It was so bang on that Bill Gates, a superfan of the show, recommended it to fellow tech heads as a professional tool: “If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley,” he wrote on his blog.
The show finished its sixth and final series last year, much to the sadness of Gates and the show’s millions of other fans. Judge insists this was the right time but he did feel a pang of regret when he read about the recent debacle with WeWork and realised he couldn’t incorporate the office space startup that lost billions into the show. “Those stories about the douchebaggy CEO who walked around barefoot …” he trails off almost longingly.
But these days, it’s Judge’s 2006 film, Idiocracy, that fans cite the most. It tells the story of a man who wakes up from a long coma to find an America that has become ultra-selfish and defiantly anti-intellectual, one in which the people anaesthetise themselves by watching TV shows with titles such as “Ow! My Balls!” Meanwhile, the moronic President Camacho, played by Terry Crews, prances about like a professional wrestler rather than a politician. There are now a million internet quizzes with titles such as: “Who said it: Camacho or Trump?”
In 2017, Crews said Idiocracy was “so prophetic in so many ways it scares people”. He was not wrong: in Idiocracy, the secretary of state is sponsored by the fastfood chain Carl’s Jr. Exactly a decade later, Trump’s pick in 2016 for secretary of labor was Andrew Puzder, former CEO of … Carl’s Jr. (Puzder ultimately withdrew.) “I definitely hear about Idiocracy a lot. If I go on Twitter it’s just all day, every day,” Judge says with a laugh. “Someone will post a clip and I’ll be like, ‘Huh, that is sort of like now.’” What does he think of the comparisons between Camacho and Trump? “There are a lot of similarities. But Camacho has more charisma.”
Judge’s latest project is, uniquely for him, totally unconnected to the zeitgeist, and this has been an enormous relief to him. “Nothing is ever not stressful, but it is nice doing something like this. There wasn’t anyone breathing down our necks to hurry up and make a documentary about funk.”
For the past three years, Judge has been quietly working on “my passion project”. While still making Silicon Valley, Judge created the first series of Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus, released in 2017. Using a mix of archive footage and animation so flat and simple it looks as if it’s from a fanzine, he tells the story of country music through its stars, from Jerry Lee Lewis to Waylon Jennings and Tammy Wynette.
Judge’s method follows Elmore Leonard’s tip: “Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.” He picks out the best stories from each person’s life: the funniest, the most tragic, the most bizarre. It’s like someone reading out to you the best bits of a celebrity’s biography, and it’s clear the show was made by someone who loves the subject. “I just wanted to totally nerd out, it’s true,” he says.
Although Judge narrates each episode, the bulk of the narrative is told by the people who knew the musicians best – band members, childhood friends, relatives, all sharing their anecdotes. “Maybe because I’m the Beavis and Butt-Head guy, they told me stories maybe they didn’t tell Ken Burns.” Country Music, Burns’s documentary, was released last year. “So the whole thing took its shape from that.”
For the second series, available to stream this week, Judge has switched to funk – a genre hardly lacking in good stories. “A lot of stuff I can’t remember because I was taking acid every day from 1968 until the end of the 70s,” says Bootsy Collins in his episode, and it’s a quote that could be the series’ maxim.
The first episode focuses on George Clinton – and, while it’s tough to single out the best story about a musician who once blew all his money on a spaceship, Clinton himself retells one that must come close: the time Clinton and his band, Parliament, were driving to Ohio while tripping on LSD. Suddenly their car was surrounded by what looked like zombies. Clinton was so scared he lost control of his bladder. Only later did they find out they’d accidentally driven on to the set of Night of the Living Dead. “I still think that stuff was weird,” says Clinton, understandably.
But Tour Bus isn’t merely laughing at whacked-out musicians. Anyone who mainly knows Rick James from his late-life appearances on Chappelle’s Show – where he turned himself into a comedy figure of excess with lines like, “Cocaine’s a helluva drug, heh heh heh” – should brace themselves for the genuinely haunting sadness of his story.
“His was one of the toughest,” says Judge. “It’s always interesting when you’re watching a documentary and you go from laughing at someone to really feeling strong sympathy. That happened in the course of me doing the interviews. I didn’t go in thinking of any of the musicians as one-dimensional, but I also didn’t know the depths of their problems.”
The extraordinary stories of superstars might seem an unlikely project for Judge, someone best known for writing about ordinary people and their ordinary workplace frustrations. Yet Tour Bus becomes exactly that: the episodes about Rick James and Morris Day are about their rivalries with a work colleague, who just happens to be Prince; the episode about Bootsy Collins shows him laughing at his tyrannical boss, who just happens to be James Brown. “That’s the stuff that jumped out at me. These people – I grew up thinking of them as mythical superhuman rock stars. So, to hear their really human stories, to have them brought down to earth, that was really interesting.”
Judge was born in Ecuador, where his father worked for a non-profit organisation. The family eventually moved back to the US and Judge majored in physics at the University of California because he was told he would always get work with a science degree. But the world of work quickly proved to be overrated.
“The first time I got a job in an office. I thought, ‘Wow, this will be great’ – because I’d only ever worked at the fast food chain Jack in the Box and in construction. But then I was like, ‘This is not great – in fact, it might be worse.’ I was alphabetising purchase orders! So my brother, a friend who was a manager at Burger King and I started talking about the weirdness of workplaces.”
And from that his first animated short, Milton’s Office Space, was born in 1991. It eventually became the film Office Space. A year later came another animated short, Frog Baseball, which became Beavis and Butt-Head. From there, as they say in documentaries about superstars, he never looked back, brilliantly satirising normal life.
But will he still be able to make TV shows about normal life when normality has been so disrupted? “I was thinking about that earlier today,” he says. “I was watching a movie and every time people shook hands I was like, ‘Stop! Get away!’ So I think it will affect writing, and people will be forever moulded by it, the way they were with the Great Depression. I think we will return to some kind of normal, but it will never be entirely normal.”
He pauses. “And that,” says the man who has made a living out of showing how abnormal normal really is, “could be kind of interesting.”
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