THE SHOCK OF THE BLUE

By Richard Zoglin

For Beavis and Butt-Head there was only one way to describe last week, the most difficult of their young lives: it sucked. MTV's animated teenage miscreants had an unfortunate run-in with real life. An Ohio mother charged that episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head, in which they gleefully plan pranks with fire, incited her five-year-old son to set their mobile home ablaze, killing his two-year-old sister. MTV responded to the tragedy with careful public statements, vowing to remove all references to fire from future shows and reiterating that the characters' antics are ''obviously unacceptable and not to be emulated in real life.'' Starting Tuesday, moreover, the network will switch the show from 7 p.m., when young children are more likely to watch, to 10:30 p.m. (It also runs at 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.) Howard Stern, by contrast, had a terrific week. The radio shock jock's first book, Private Parts, already has 1 million copies in print, little more than a week after publication, and has debuted at No. 1 on the Publishers Weekly nonfiction best-seller list. Crowds lined up around the block in midtown Manhattan last week just to get Stern to autograph copies. Quite a response to a 435-page autobiography filled with explicit sex talk, nasty put-downs of such celebrities as Johnny Carson and Arsenio Hall, and rampant ethnic slurs (''How do you like those Hispanic chicks who dye their hair blond? That's an attractive look. No wonder some Spanish guys are ready to rape any white woman who comes along''.) As for Ted Danson, he's still dealing with the fallout from a rare stab at stand-up comedy. Appearing at a Friars Club roast for his lover, Whoopi Goldberg, Danson wore blackface makeup, made crude jokes about their sex life and freely used a common derogatory word for black people. New York City Mayor David Dinkins was offended, and talk-show host Montel Williams resigned from the Friars Club in protest. But Goldberg stood by her man, saying she helped write the material herself. ''We were not trying to be politically correct,'' she said. ''We were trying to be funny for ourselves.'' Increasingly, the two have seemed to be mutually exclusive. The guardians of political correctness -- the careful laundering of speech, actions and school textbooks to avoid offending women, ethnic groups and other minorities -- have been riding high in recent years. Editorialists and TV commentators have fumed at the new censorship, but only now is the edifice of p.c. starting to take some heavy shelling. The comedians are coming. A pop-culture backlash against p.c. was inevitable. Under the watchful eye of the p.c. police, mainstream culture has become cautious, sanitized, scared of its own shadow. Network TV, targeted by antiviolence crusaders and nervous about offending advertisers, has purged itself of what little edge and controversy it once had. Hollywood movies, seeking blockbuster audiences, are shying away from the restrictive R rating (not to mention the dreaded NC-17) and stressing feel-good family entertainment. Everyone is watching his or her words; language has grown cumbersome, self-conscious and freighted with symbolic baggage. In such an uptight climate, cultural renegades are doing what they have always done: trying to shock, offend, liberate. Stern's gross-out radio act, like his book, is all about saying the unsayable -- at least, within the limits of what the FCC will allow a station to broadcast and still keep its license. Beavis and Butt-Head, with their geeky irresponsibility and maddening Neanderthal laugh, are adolescent ids running wild, doing everything parents tell you not to -- picking their noses, torturing pets, playing with matches. Political correctness, once the province of a small band of liberal reformers, has been around long enough to become Establishment orthodoxy -- which means it is fair game for satire. It is now p.c. to make fun of p.c. On last week's episode of Murphy Brown (arguably the most politically correct show on TV, now that Designing Women is gone), a newscaster got into trouble for calling a female fighter pilot a ''girl.'' Audience members at a town-hall meeting later overreacted with a torrent of p.c.-speak: a tall woman with glasses, for instance, demanded to be called ''vertically enhanced'' and ''visually challenged.'' The p.c. backlash is spreading across the cultural plains. A newly expanded edition of The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, written by Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, has just come out, with its tongue-in- cheek catalog of p.c. terms. (Looters are now ''nontraditional shoppers.'') At Hooters, a fast-growing Atlanta-based restaurant chain, waitresses call themselves ''Hooters Girls,'' wear revealing skintight outfits, and appear on trading cards that trumpet their measurements. Says Scott Allmendinger, editor of Restaurant Business: ''There's a mainstream of the American public that's just tired of being politically correct.'' And another stream that is still capable of getting teed off. ''Hooters is part of a collective backlash against the progress that women have made,'' charges Kim Gandy, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women. To be sure, the p.c. forces are not conceding any ground yet, as Goldberg and Danson found out. So did comedian Jackie Mason, who raised a ruckus at a police banquet in New York City when he referred to members of Mayor Dinkins' administration by the Yiddish term shvartzer. Mason, who is preparing another one-man Broadway show this season, entitled (what else?) Politically Incorrect, got into a similar scrape four years ago, but this time has responded more defiantly. ''I positively don't apologize,'' he said. ''I'm telling a joke here.'' Telling jokes has always been somewhat at odds with the p.c. ethos. To be politically correct, one must be constantly sensitive to the feelings of others. To be a comedian, one frequently has to ignore them. People like Stern, says Dr. Harvey Greenberg, professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, are ''part of a narcissistic culture, where you don't always recognize your impact on other people, and your own little turf is the most important.'' The difficulty most people have with slash-and-burn comedy is separating the conceptual satire (''Look how uptight people are over these words!'') from the real-world impact (''How can he say that about black people?!''). Comedians themselves are much better at keeping the two distinct. After spewing out ethnic insults on the Tonight Show, Don Rickles (who is back on TV this fall in a Fox sitcom) usually let Johnny Carson know what a sweet guy he really was inside. Stern, after staying aloof from the press for years, has suddenly turned into a ubiquitous and cooperative talk-show guest -- the big, shaggy ''bad boy'' of radio. Friars Club roasts have long served as a sort of free-fire zone, where offensive material can spew forth uncensored, mainly because everybody in attendance knows the rules -- though, to the dismay of Danson and Goldberg, not always. Beavis and Butt-Head's troubles come from the same sort of confusion. The two cartoon nerds do not encourage stupidity and cruelty to animals; they satirize it. The show may actually be an endorsement of politically correct attitudes, points out Jack Nachbar, professor of popular culture at Ohio's Bowling Green State University. ''If you have a bigot put in front of you and made to look ridiculous,'' he says, ''then that becomes an attack on bigotry. Beavis and Butt-Head, politically incorrect as they are, are also idiots.'' The problem, of course, is that preteen children -- part of the show's audience -- are not very good at catching the distinction. That is why removing the program from the early evening hours, when most young kids watch, is a better solution than eviscerating the show by trying to tone it down. Who wants to watch Beavis and Butt-Head behave?

BOX: ''I hate every f---ing place in the world. I hate Europe. I hate the Bahamas and ll those islands filled with hostile natives.'' -- HOWARD STERN

With reporting by Michael Riley/Atlanta and William Tynan/New York