I confess — not without shame, shame that stings, shame of the sort that can lead one to insert lengthy, convoluted, Henry Jamesian introductory clauses into one's opening sentence in an attempt, doubtless alas futile, to create the illusion of intellectual elegance and style — to a certain fondness for "Beavis and Butt-head."

Those dueling mechanical-ape snickers, prematurely ejaculating from the hapless youths' lips at the sight of those large American BREASTS they are doomed never to fondle! Beavis' addictively creepy pterodactyl-like jaw, and his tiny stick arms that wave in infantile envy and excitement! Butt-head's embarrassingly adenoidal voice, cracking as lame-o heavy metal bands prance across the boob tube stage! Those inexplicable shorts! That general aura — somehow, in the end, invincibly lovable — of dumbshit teen camaraderie!

It's all pretty amusing, and the show's autistic drawing style and wooden animation only heightens the gag. "Beavis and Butt-head" is a worthy microbe, a wacky paramecium wiggling about in the petri dish of the tube. Watching it offers the same dinky psychic satisfactions as watching Don Cornelius waxing profundo on "Soul Train," John McLaughlin declaiming "The answer is four, Mor-ton" or Dan Rather smirking enigmatically at some weird on-the-air thought. Like those excellent things, it delivers satisfactions as predictable — and momentous — as an order of McDonald's fries.

For all of its virtues, however, "Beavis and Butt-head" is not a front-burner aesthetic activity. It is best watched while doing something else — reading Kant's "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic," say, or rigging a model clipper ship inside a bottle. Its act plays better in the psychic shrubbery. There is a certain undeniable half-kitschy pleasure in listening to the early Stones on a scratchy transistor radio with a speaker the size of an M&M, but you wouldn't want to rig that unit up to a Nakamichi amp and Bose speakers. It wouldn't sound good.

Unfortunately, that's precisely what "Beavis" creator Mike Judge has done in "Beavis and Butt-head Do America." There are some yucks in this ludicrous movie, but what was amusingly imbecilic at 20 inches becomes simply simian at 20 feet. To paraphrase SCTV's fishing louts, some things just don't blow up real good.

The film opens with the theft — gasp— of B&B's TV set. Shattered by this apocalyptic event ("This sucks more than anything has ever sucked before," intones Butt-head in hushed tones), the boys break into a bad guy's motel room in search of TV. The bad guy thinks they're the hit men he hired to plant his evil wife and sends them to Vegas to kill her, not realizing that B&B think they're supposed to "do" her.

When they meet the curvy femme fatale, they strip down to their dingy underwear, cackling and grunting that they're finally going to "score"; instead of deflowering them, however, she surreptitiously sews a tube of stolen Ebola-like virus into Butt-head's pants. A less-than-convincing plot device (she tells them that if they go to Washington, she'll have sex with them) propels the lads across country on a tour bus, pursued by Federal agents who believe them to be the most dangerous criminals in the country. They end up in the White House, where they are awarded a medal by an oily Clinton.

All surpassingly dumb, of course, but actually not quite dumb enough. A truly surreal, we-made-it-up-as-we-went-along plot line, something along the extraterrestrial lines of "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" might have elevated "Beavis and Butt-head Do America" to a point of inspired lunacy. And more cultural-debris in-jokes, like the hilarious Starsky and Hutch-inspired freeze-frames in the titles, might have helped. But such moments are few and far between. Mostly, we get dumb formula, not quite ironic and self-mocking enough to be hip. Beavis hitting Butt-head. Tit jokes. Auto crash jokes. Nun jokes. And an FBI chief (played, in a devolution of his "Airplane" role, by Designated Gravel-Voice Robert Stack) constantly ordering "cavity searches" on senior citizens. (This latter gag was funny the first time and, by some strange quirk, the 16th, but the other 14 were unamusing to an extreme.) Not really social satire, not utterly wacked-out nuttiness, B&B Do America" most closely resembles a fairly weak "Three Stooges" episode.

Part of the problem is that the movie abandons the show's central shtick, the meta-gag in which the boys yuck it up over dumb rock videos. It's easy to understand why — the device is so puerile, ingrown and TV-specific that it would probably have bombed on the big screen. But despite its monumental stupidity — or maybe because of it — this "Mystery Science Theater"-style commentary is weirdly essential to the show: it breaks the cartoon illusion and gives the cretins their only chance to be semi-hip. Without it, they simply become the Moe and Curly of hormone-land.

One final gripe: What's up with the presentation of all federal authority — FBI, ATF, etc. — as Gestapo-like thugs? I find it more than a little unnerving that a popular-with-teens, zeitgeist-surfing show like this presents Federal agents as jackbooted Nazis, arresting people for no reason and smashing everything in sight. In this regard, the movie seems to represent a blandly scary convergence of the Oklahoma City/Ruby Ridge militia mentality with the stoner, wow-man-they-busted-me mindset. Maybe Bill Bennett and his clones are right and Beavis and Butt-head really are corrupters of America's youth. Of course, now that the boys have joined the anti-government brigade, Newt and Co. will probably give them a medal.