Often he doesn’t realize the sources of his comic inventions until after the fact. “Some of the best stuff comes when you just let it flow, and then later I can go, Oh, I guess that’s kind of like this,” he said. Take Beavis and Butt-Head themselves: when I asked Judge whether they bore any similarities to him and his brother, he said, “I never thought about it at the beginning, but yeah, Butt-Head being my brother and me Beavis, there’s a little bit of that.”

In the stories Judge tells, an underlying motif is his attraction to oddballs — the kid from elementary school, the angry guy he used to prank-call. They’re people whom many of us would instinctively shy away from, or at least refrain from calling up repeatedly, but Judge’s compulsion is to go back for more. “I’ve always had that thing — people that nobody pays much attention to, that I become obsessed with,” he says.

He himself comes across as self-contained, speaking deliberately and punctuating his stories with a dry chuckle. Friends say that he resembles both Butt-Head, the contrary adolescent, and Hank Hill, the rule-abiding adult from “King of the Hill.” Paul Beroza, one of Judge’s college roommates, recalls: “He was the most careful motorcycle rider I ever saw. He would very cautiously ride his motorcycle around.” But Judge also loves surfing, which isn’t a pastime for the timid. (And he has the physique to show for it. His friend Johnny Knoxville, co-creator and star of the “Jackass” franchise, complains: “He just gets more chiseled and tanned and ruggedly handsome as he gets older. Mike Judge is a hot piece of man meat.”)

Judge, who is divorced and has three children, has gravitated toward male-dominated arenas in life, like those of physics and blues bands, and toward male characters in his work. Maybe there’s a gene for humor on the Judge Y chromosomes: asked to name the people in his family he considered funny, he listed his brother, his father, his father’s brother Ned and his paternal grandfather, who was born in Montana. His forerunners on that side of the family were homesteaders and ranchers and miners, and as far removed as those frontiersmen were from the world of “Beavis and Butt-Head,” they might have passed down a knack for teasing laughter out of monotony. Much of what Judge concocts could be called comedies of (male) boredom — two teenagers sitting on a couch or in the back of class in “Beavis and Butt-Head,” a group of suburban men shooting the breeze in “King of the Hill,” frustrated cubicle workers in “Office Space,” a frustrated married man in “Extract.” And yet it’s not mere tedium that afflicts Judge’s characters. Their boredom is inflected with both subversion and learned helplessness. Beavis and Butt-Head don’t drop out of school; they just sit there in class and learn nothing.

In Austin, Judge works out of a one-story gray building on the southern edge of the University of Texas student ghetto, marked only with the street number and a “No Soliciting” sign in the window. He bought the place in 1995 from a hypnotherapist who told him it once housed a massage parlor. Inside, a low-ceilinged hallway connects a series of small rooms, which contain Judge’s work equipment, musical instruments, a pool table and a kind of 3-D scrapbook of his professional life. Framed stills from his animated shows hang on the walls, along with the bar sign (“Sidelines”) from “Extract,” a rendering of the office building from “Office Space” and other mementos. What Judge was most eager to show off, though, was a 1989 photograph in a copy of “Living Blues” magazine, which pictured Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets, one of the bands he used to play with, along with the Texas Upsetters — Little Richard’s band. In the caption, Judge is identified as “unknown bassist.”

When he was not long out of school, Judge moved to Dallas with his college girlfriend, who’d taken a job there. They lived in the middle-class suburb of Richardson, which provided much of the fodder for “King of the Hill,” and Judge, who had tried and despised a couple of engineering jobs, played bass professionally and enrolled in graduate math courses, with a notion of teaching or working as an actuary. Then he attended an animation festival and noted that one of the shorts had been made by a local man. Spurred to create an animation himself, Judge bought a film camera and went to work.