notes on The Muppet Show

I was sitting in the back garden area of this little cafe, eating very good fish. I had tea. I was on a bench at a table, and there was a girl sitting across from me, just loudly smacking her lips around in the most dramatically shaped chew and slurp I’d ever witnessed, both visually and sonically. She’s smacking her lips, sucking on her own gums, licking wildly at the crevices between her teeth. At first it really angered me, and felt like some type of unsolicited broadcast of personal experience infringing upon my peace. But then, I tried to perceive her as I imagined Jim Henson might; as a vibrating little bitch of a Muppet. And suddenly, the annoyance became so very fun. The absurdity of being alive and inside a society became glaringly present, and I felt empathy… and then love… for this person who, just moments before, had incited total rage. Ever since, this has been a framework for shifting perception that I attempt all the time; to see things as a fellow muppet. Thanks babe. 

Before I left the table, a bird flew across the space between us. She recoiled, and we both burst out laughing.

The Muppet Show actually had two different pilot episodes before season one, neither of which are included in any official episodic collection, but they are both very good. One of them is a Valentine’s Day Special. The other one, and the one you should absolutely watch, is a pilot called “Sex and Violence”, which aired in March of 1975.

The show opens with a massive rock carved as words reading “SEX AND VIOLENCE”. A voiceover introduces The Muppet Show as “the end of sex and violence on television”, while Crazy Harry (the pyrotechnics expert muppet) pushes a TNT plunger, blowing up the rock-words.
Jim Henson’s seemingly favorite and best formal strategies are these self-reflexive jokes about cultural ideas and social functions. He sets up a recognizable premise, and then bends it out of the way; everything in the world of muppets is mutable- both physically and conceptually. He was so smart about being stupid, which I believe to be the highest level of Play within any cultural landscape. This is the type of Play that is anti-hierarchical without being reactionary. Fun is the most underrated subversive tool.

The overarching narrative of this pilot is that the muppets are putting on a pageant of the seven deadly sins. Throughout the episode, we see each sin arrive to set and be assigned to their dressing room. I love this idea so much, but the actual content of the episode happens as small unrelated sketches that bounce around in between the moments of the pageant storyline. Here are some important moments:

In a wonderfully stupid sketch called The Theater of Things, we are gifted a most simple expression of complex ideas around representation, abstraction, semiotics, and politics.
A pencil addresses a mass collective of other pencils:
“objects, citizens, and countrymen. I give you— our new ruler!”
A ruler enters, and speaks to the mass of pencils:
“We all know the last ruler was crooked!
He didn’t measure up!
I’m going to tell you where to draw the line!
Now… get the lead out!”
And the mobilized pencils follow the ruler off screen.

The Wrestling Match, in which the announcer tells us that one opponent is “redesigning” the other’s left leg.

A recurring sketch of Statler and Waldorf sitting quietly in their den, sharing single sentence thoughts with each other. In one vignette, Waldorf tells Statler “my foot’s asleep”. In another, Statler says “Either our clock is broken, or we just died”.

In a sketch titled Aggression, we see an interaction between two classes of creatures; the “heaps” which are beautifully described in the script as “gross clumps of crud - fabric, feathers, and foam”, and the “stalks” which have long pointed noses and distinguished accents. After repeatedly bothering and poking the heaps, the stalk gets hit in the nose, disfiguring him.

There are several other sketches intermittent, and we are finally brought to the title screen for the Seven Deadly Sins Pageant… then immediately told that we’ve run out of time, and the show is over; another expectation set up only to be playfully subverted. As the credits roll, the camera slowly zooms out to reveal the puppeteers running around while enacting the final scene.

The Muppet Show’s (beyond just the Sex and Violence pilot) general premise is centered around a bunch of freak characters who are collaborating to make a show happen.. I think this structure gives it a special ability to inherently make continual commentary on what it means, and how to feels, to create things (kermit’s skull is literally a human hand).. particularly in collaboration with others, who may have various differing roles, motives, and point of views. The muppets make meaning as individuals by being contextualized by eachother, and also by what is created from their collective efforts.
There’s also a sort of Brechtian thing that happens through this premise, where we become knowingly aware of our investment in a constructed world— we see all the apparatus and processes of the muppets putting together their show; we see backstage, we see them arguing about sketches to include or not, we see them pitching performance ideas, etc etc. There is an obvious mirroring here between the muppets making a show, and the people who make The Muppet Show. Henson also does this when, on multiple occasions, he has Kermit insist on reminding talk show hosts and the like, that he is, in fact, a puppet. All of this presents the viewer with the rupturing acknowledgement that this entire world, in which we are invested, is built by someone. If this world has been built, with form and apparatus as the enforcing entities (as opposed to divine absolutism or “god-given” or something along those lines), then it is also changeable and mutable. A construction can always be deconstructed, or altered or challenged or adapted or added to. So, if we can identify with this world while we also acknowledge it as MUTABLE, maybe we can then identify with the mutability of our own world. Maybe we can start to see the parts of our society that are built constructions, enforced by flimsy social productions, and are therefore changeable. Or, at very least, something available to be played with.

I talked a little bit about this question of form in film, in the context of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, during the inaugural episode of Angelic Transmissions, which is a new radio talk show about art on East Village Radio, hosted by Jarrett Earnest. I’m helping produce the show, and I have a little segment each episode where I talk about films playing at Anthology Film Archives in their Essential Cinema programming. Angelic Transmissions will be streaming on eastvillageradio.com every other Monday 12noon -2 (next show is aug 12)

Thank you for reading my first Gut Flora log! This is a total experiment, so the next issue may be really different. I don’t know. Do you think it was way too long? I am going to write about Forough Farrokhzad next, and I’m also rewatching Berserk right now. I also plan to put out some archival materials— for example I have some old conversations with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and a xerox of collected writings with Peter Lamborn Wilson. I will also include my own sketches and video. So, those are the types of things to come. Please don’t hesitate to share any thoughts, or feedback, or anything you want!

Love you
XO L