Austin Messner controversy

Comedians is the first episode of Season 3 of mh:besttvshows:Beavis and Butt-Head, which aired on September 6, 1993. It caused the show to be the subject of a major television controversy after a 5-year old boy burned his family's Dayton, Ohio trailer home down and killed his 2-year old sister, as he was believed to have been inspired by this episode.

Background
On October 6, 1993, a 5-year old boy named Austin Messner watched the episode. That night, Messner was looking for a cigarette lighter to imitate Beavis. When he started to light it up, he burned his family's trailer home down, which killed his 2-year old sister, Jessica Matthews. Luckily, his mother, Darcy Burke, survived, but she didn't blame her son for doing that; instead, she blamed the show for allegedly promoting that fire is cool and fun.

Aftermath
MTV announced it would move the cartoon to 10:30 PM and delete any references to starting fires from MTV's animated shows. MTV also added a disclaimer to warn young viewers not to imitate Beavis and Butt-head since they do dangerous things that could kill them in real life. "Comedians" was also never aired on television again after the incident. The disclaimer read "Beavis and Butt-Head are not real. They are stupid cartoon people completely made up by this Texas guy whom we hardly even know. Beavis and Butt-Head are dumb, crude, thoughtless, ugly, sexist, self-destructive fools. But for some reason, the little wienerheads make us laugh." This was later changed to "Beavis and Butt-Head are not role models. They're not even human. They're cartoons. Some of the things they do would cause a person to get hurt, expelled, arrested, possibly deported. To put it another way: don't try this at home."

Beavis and Butt-Head was temporarily moved to the late-night timeslot in 1994 to make room for its replacement, The Brothers Grunt.

In 2008, Austin Messner himself had this to say after he was contacted about the fire:

Videos
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