EPISODE 528: IT'S TIME TO PLAY THE MUSIC

As a kid I always identified with Kermit the Frog, but the older I get the more I "get" Gonzo, you know?

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

On Friday Disney + is debuting a new Muppets show. Huzzah!

This week my inbox and brain space has had lots of Muppets’ material passing through.

My friend Ken sent me this:

Which led me to these insanely funny Cookie Monster/John Oliver outtakes:

And that led me to this recent interview with Gonzo, which is impossible to take as anything other than a legit interview. It’s not even that funny, which somehow makes it more hilarious.

And all of that led me to this incredible hour of television where the Muppets pay tribute to the then-recently passed away Jim Henson, which you should definitely watch with Kleenex handy.

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Here are some crazy Muppet facts that I learned this week especially for you.

Kermit the Frog was originally made out of some ping pong balls and Jim Henson’s mom’s coat. Also, he looks like he has had a hard life.

To film “Rainbow Connection,” Henson sat in an underwater canister with a monitor to let him see how the shot looked. He was so cramped from the experience he had trouble unfolding his arms and legs when they brought him back up.

(Also, in 1996 a man in New Zealand took a radio station hostage until it played “Rainbow Connection”. As some of my friends in Australia would say, “Quite right.”)

Miss Piggy is supposedly from Iowa, was originally called Miss Piggy Lee and has a DARK origin story. From CNN: “Frank Oz once said that Miss Piggy grew up in Iowa; her dad died when she was young and her mother was mean. She had to enter beauty contests to make money.”

The Muppets are actually British. (When no US producer would back the venture, Henson looked to Britain, and that’s where the original show was created and produced.)

An inside New Yorker Joke: Waldorf’s Wife’s Name is Astoria. Also, apparently she looks just like Stadler.

When The Muppet Show first began Fozzie the Bear actually made people uncomfortable, because when Stadler and Waldorf made fun of him he cried. They fixed the problem by turning him into an optimist.

Frank Oz says Animal can be summarized in five words: Drums. Sleep. Food. Sex. Pain.

Seems right.

Almost all the Muppets are left-handed.

Rowlf, who along with Gonzo is the greatest, was performing in commercials over a decade before the Muppet Show came along (for real) and was a regular on the Jimmy Dean Show from 1963-1966. (He supposedly received more fan mail than the host.)

When he’s creating Muppets Dave Goelz (Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen and Zoot) starts by taking a flaw within himself and amplifying it to make it lovable. Which to me sounds like a fantastic way of dealing with our own flaws and the flaws of others.

Think of how much better we’d all feel if when we looked the part of ourselves we like the least we saw this:

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Anyone who has followed my newsletter for long knows I love oral histories. Here’s an Oral History of the Muppets; the Oral History of the Muppet Movie; and an Oral History of the Muppets’ Christmas Carol.

(I really love oral histories, you guys.)  

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For those who are not into Muppets:

But also, here’s Bill Murray celebrating the start of the Chicago Cubs’ season.

Marquee Sports Network @WatchMarquee

Bill Murray with the 7th inning stretch!

The man is a national treasure.

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You know the thing about the Muppets is, on paper that concept probably shouldn’t work. TV writers love to make shows about making shows because that’s their life. But generally they’re not that interesting to other people.

But the Muppets has always been about a group of performers trying to put on a show. Sometimes it’s a TV show, sometimes it’s a movie, sometimes it’s a variety show. Most of it is back stage hijinks and drama. Sometimes there’s a certain actor-ly neediness, a please like us! And yet no matter what we’re always rooting for them.

Not only that, when the show’s over we don’t say that was a great show about putting on a show. We say we love the Muppets.

There’s some kind of magic in there. I think it’s this: the Muppets are always a story about a group of friends who are trying to do something crazy and hard together. And in that way they give a warm and hopeful spin to our own experience of life. They remind we’re all a part of some kind of community, whether it’s the people we work with or the neighbors on our block or the nerds we put on plays with. And watching the Muppets, we get to see how wonderful and hilarious our communities actually are.

Maybe we discover too, there’s a kind of mission to our ordinary lives, or a capacity in us to make the world better just by trying to do things together in it. “Why do we always come here? I guess we'll never know,” the Muppets sing in the strangely haunting middle lines of their theme song.

And yet we do keep coming back to communities, no matter how messy or flawed they are. And somehow more than a shelter from the storms, those communites end up being just by virtue of our efforts a better world quietly, slowly, fumblingly coming into ridiculous and wonderful being.

So play the music. Light the lights!