People opened up because I'm the Beavis and Butt-head guy': Mike Judge on his new funk direction

The writer-director's comedies - from Office Space to Silicon Valley - always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?

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.