Inside the Mind of Mike Judge, the Slacker Soothsayer

Television comedy writer and producer Mike Judge, reacts during a Bloomberg Television interview at the Vanity Fair 2015 New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2015. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Mike Judge, who rose to fame during MTV’s ’90s heyday with slacker cartoon duo, Beavis and Butt-Head, has come a long way—sort of.

Or as the New York Times calls him in an interesting new profile, “America’s foremost chronicler of its own self-destructive tendencies.”

Judge has seemingly been ahead of his time, time and time again, producing movies that have a way of predicting the future. Take Office Space, for example. The 1999 movie about bored IT employees bombed at the box office but ended up becoming one of the most quoted movies of the aughts and somewhat foreshadowed the big Silicon Valley boom (to that end, it makes sense that Judge also created the hit HBO series Silicon Valley).

But maybe his most prescient work was 2006’s Idiocracy, which too, bombed, but has been evoked by liberals ever since Donald Trump won the presidency. And for good reason: It’s rife with parallels to the present day. “In Idiocracy, the secretary of state is sponsored by Carl’s Jr., a company whose chairman very nearly became our current secretary of labor,” as The Times writes. And by 2505, the movie’s president is a former wrestler/television star who is also a brand name….

Read the full New York Times Magazine profile here.

Watch the original trailer for Idiocracy below and decide for yourself.