Download The Performance of Nonconformity on The Muppet

The Performance of Nonconformity on
The Muppet Show—or, How Kermit Made
Me Queer
JORDAN SCHILDCROUT
1976 AND 1981, JIM HENSON PRODUCTIONS CREATED
The Muppet Show, a syndicated half-hour television variety show
performed almost entirely by puppets. Previously, Henson was
best known for being one of the key creators of Sesame Street, Children’s
Television Workshop’s breakthrough program that since 1969 has been
mixing education with entertainment for preschool audiences. In addition to winning the hearts and minds of small children all over the
world with Muppet characters like Big Bird, Grover, and Cookie
Monster, Sesame Street had the explicit mandate of using children’s
television as an educational tool, teaching basics like letters and numbers, while also instilling progressive values by presenting an idealized
vision of an urban multicultural neighborhood (Palmer 91 – 119).
Other children’s programs in the 1970s followed the lead of CTW,
including School House Rock, the between-show animated musical shorts
which taught math and grammar as well as a humanist, melting-pot
view of American history; and Free to Be You and Me, a multimedia
project coordinated by Marlo Thomas with no less a goal than liberating children—both boys and girls—from rigid gender stereotypes.
The Muppet Show, however, had no such explicit agenda. It presented
itself as pure entertainment and made no claims of ‘‘usefulness’’ at all.
However, as numerous scholars in cultural studies have demonstrated,
all cultural products have meaning, because they are created and consumed by people who cannot be separated from their social realities and
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ETWEEN
The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 41, No. 5, 2008
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Journal compilation r 2008, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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ideologies. Despite the lack of any explicit agenda, The Muppet Show
conveys a particular worldview that is arguably as progressive today as it
was in the late 1970s. As of Fall 2008, the first three complete seasons,
as well as various episodes in ‘‘The Best of The Muppet Show’’ collections,
are available on DVD, allowing viewers who originally viewed the program during childhood to reexamine the show from an adult perspective.
For children’s television, The Muppet Show is unexpectedly sophisticated—
smartly written, expertly performed, with high production values, and
employing verbal wit, satire, and irony. Even more surprising is the
show’s consistent and emphatic expression of a nonconformist ethos. The
Muppet Show, one of the most successful television programs of its time,
imagines the theatre as a venue for rebellion against propriety, where
performers can irreverently ‘‘play’’ with cultural norms. And because
cultural products (e.g., songs, jokes, and fictional characters) reflect and
construct our understanding of social categories and identities, the Muppets’ zany performances present challenges, simultaneously gleeful and
significant, to normative notions of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
The Thrill of Live Performance and Legacy of Popular
Culture on The Muppet Show
It’s time to play the music.
It’s time to light the lights.
It’s time to meet the Muppets
On The Muppet Show tonight . . .
‘‘The Muppet Show Theme’’ by Jim Henson and Sam Pottle
Jim Henson’s career leading up to the creation of The Muppet Show
reflects a combination of commercial savvy and anticonformist creativity. As Christopher Finch notes in his history of the Muppets,
Henson’s sense of humor was shaped by his admiration for the irreverent and parodic comedians of the 1950s, including Stan Freberg,
Spike Jones, and Ernie Kovacs (Finch 7).1 Throughout the 1960s,
Henson was involved in a variety of enterprises, including performing
Rowlf the Dog on The Jimmy Dean Show, making numerous television
commercials for products ranging from Royal Crown Cola to IBM, and
appearing regularly (usually as Kermit the Frog) on The Today Show and
The Ed Sullivan Show. While finding success with these mainstream
commercial endeavors, Henson also experimented with filmmaking
that was avant-garde or counter-cultural, including Timepiece (1965), a
The Performance of Nonconformity on The Muppet Show
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short surreal film that earned Henson an Academy Award nomination,
and a documentary exploration of the counter-cultural revolution called
Youth ‘68, broadcast by NBC. By the time Joan Ganz Cooney of CTW
hired the longhaired, bearded Henson to help create Sesame Street, he
had already assembled a core group of collaborators who shared his
sensibility, including puppet designer and builder Don Sahlin, writer
Jerry Juhl, and fellow performer Frank Oz.
The creation of The Muppet Show also seems based in a mixture of
commercial ambition and creative experimentation. Henson struggled to
translate the stellar success of Sesame Street into opportunities to develop
more sophisticated puppets as well as more sophisticated audiences, but
every major American network turned down his proposal for The Muppet
Show. Finally a British production company, ITC, picked it up. Filmed at
a studio outside London, The Muppet Show was an independent production, developed without network influence, and syndicated to local stations. Perhaps because of the lack of interference from commercial
networks in the creative process, a spirit of quirky independence pervades
The Muppet Show. By the second season, it was a major hit.
Despite its televisual medium, much of the appeal of The Muppet Show
comes from the traditions and values of live performance, particularly
American vaudeville and British music hall. The Muppet Show takes place
entirely in the world of The Muppet Theatre—a traditional ‘‘Jewel Box’’
performance space, with a proscenium arch, a red velvet curtain, and
footlights. Each week, a special guest star—made all the more special by
the fact that he or she is the only human being on the show—visits the
Muppet Theatre, managed and emceed by Kermit the Frog and featuring
a regular cast of Muppet players, including the diva Miss Piggy, the
comedian Fozzie Bear, and the one-man freak show The Great Gonzo.
The Muppets and their guests perform musical numbers running
the gamut from Victorian novelty songs and Broadway show tunes to
contemporary disco and rock. For comedy, the show features recurring
segments, such as the sci-fi satire ‘‘Pigs in Space’’ and the pun-infested
soap opera ‘‘Veterinarian’s Hospital.’’ Reinventing the vaudeville tradition in a wholly comic vein, The Muppet Show is notable for its
travesties of a wide variety of ‘‘serious’’ genres and forms, including
melodrama, ballet, opera, classical music, romantic crooning, and even
patriotic oration and cooking demonstrations. Because The Muppet Show
re-envisions and reconstructs a century’s worth of entertainment
through the fractured lens of parody, the result is a show in which the
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silly and the lowbrow almost always win out over the serious and the
respectable.2 The show’s guest stars are occasionally allowed a sincere or
sentimental moment, such as when Julie Andrews sings a ballad to
Kermit in order to comfort him. But overall The Muppet Show presents
the theatre as a topsy-turvy funhouse, mixing show business razzmatazz
with fantastic anarchy—as if 42nd Street were the main thoroughfare
of Alice’s Wonderland.3 The Muppet Theatre is the home of misfits and
oddballs, zany characters who consistently flout convention. When
‘‘highbrow’’ guests appear, they usually engage in lowbrow folderol,
such as Beverly Sills tap dancing to a country-western song or joining
Gonzo in his revolutionary new art form, spoon hanging.
The Muppet Show highlights the festive qualities of popular culture by
frequently breaking down the barriers (within its own narrative world)
that separate producer, performer, and spectator. The thrill of live entertainment is not just presented on stage; it exists in every corner of the
Muppet Theatre, including backstage and in the audience. The Muppet
Show regularly features lively interaction between the Muppet performers and the Muppet audience, including frequent audience participation
in the performance. The notion of popular entertainment as a ‘‘folk
culture’’ is further enhanced by the backstage comradery among performers who share the communal joy of performing for each other, not
just for economic remuneration in front of a paying audience.4 Performing creates a community out of these odd creatures, and their desire
to perform gives them the strength to overcome adversity. Nearly every
week the show is threatened with some catastrophe, ranging from the
realistic (the musicians go on strike) to the ridiculous (Dr. Bunsen
Honeydew’s dematerialization machine has everyone disappearing and
reappearing at awkward moments). But each week the show goes on
because the Muppets are, in the language of vaudeville, ‘‘troupers.’’ The
kooky fun, the comradery, and the perseverance of show folk are celebrated each week, making heroes out of the weirdoes, misfits, and
losers that find a home in the Muppet Theatre.
The Performance of Race, Gender, and Sexuality on
The Muppet Show
The Muppet Show consistently crosses the supposed boundaries between
highbrow and lowbrow, between onstage and offstage, and between
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amateur and professional. In doing so, the show creates a comic and
fantastic world that is nevertheless still grounded in certain social
realities. The history of entertainment cannot be fully separated from
historically constructed categories of identity based on race, gender,
and sexuality; indeed, struggles and negotiations over social differences
are often most evident in these cultural products. Because the Muppets
are inheritors of and participants in this cultural legacy, do their acts
perpetuate the racism, sexism, and homophobia that pervade the history of entertainment? While The Muppet Show reiterates certain racist,
sexist, and homophobic tropes, the Muppets’ boundary-defying ‘‘play’’
frequently destabilizes fixed notions of cultural identity. By failing or
refusing to conform to their ‘‘proper’’ roles, the characters on The
Muppet Show ‘‘queer’’ categorical identities based on race, gender, and
sexuality, exposing them as performances, rather than inherent or immutable essences.5
The performance of racial and ethnic identities is often essential to
the entertainment of The Muppet Show. Among the show’s white guest
stars, there are no instances of racial impersonation—the common vaudevillian practice of blackface, for example, has no place on this
show—but there is a sort of ethnic buffoonery, usually with white
performers portraying stereotypes of white ethnicities: Italian gangsters, German scientists, and so on. Of the 120 guest stars who appeared on the series, about 10% are members of racial minorities,
which, statistically, makes The Muppet Show typical of children’s television programming in the 1970s (Barcus 81).6 The black and Latino
guests who ‘‘perform their ethnicity’’ do so with the joy and dignity of
self-representation, not travesty or belittlement. When Harry Belafonte sings the calypso ‘‘Turn the World Around’’ with a chorus of
African-masked singers, he invites all the Muppets to join in the song,
using entertainment to create a world in which we are all welcome to
cross boundaries of race, nation, and culture in order to sing along.
Matters become more complicated when looking at the Muppets
themselves. Some of the Muppets are explicitly white. For example, the
skin tone and hair of Statler and Waldorf, the elderly curmudgeons and
permanent residents of the box seats stage left, physically indicate
whiteness. Other Muppets are culturally coded as white, such as the
members of the hillbilly jug band and the Swedish Chef. There are no
regularly appearing Muppets who represent nonwhite ethnicities in the
same physically and culturally explicit fashion, although there are
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specialty bit players brought in for occasional ethnic clowning, such as
a Japanese karate troupe, a posse of gun-toting Mexican banditos, or a
group of Arab sheiks drilling for oil in the theatre. (Responding to this
lack of cultural diversity, more recent Muppet endeavors, such as the
television variety show Muppets Tonight [1996], feature regular players
with explicitly nonwhite ethnicities, including a Hispanic prawn
named Pepe and an African American crawfish named Clifford.)
But most Muppets defy the categorizations of race and ethnicity.
Physically, they come in a variety of unrealistic sizes and shapes, with
blue, green, and purple skin. Is it possible to determine the ethnicity of
Zoot, the blue-skinned saxophone player? The question becomes more
confusing when we acknowledge that human Muppets of any color are
in the minority: most Muppets are animals, monsters, and even objects.
Is it possible to assign ethnicity to a dog who plays the piano or a sixfoot tall carrot who sings? If the dog is playing a Duke Ellington song
and the carrot is singing a Gilbert and Sullivan medley, does that make
ethnic identity any more certain? While it would be impossible for the
Muppets to create a world completely unattached to cultural notions of
ethnicity, especially because the very acts of entertainment that they
perform must be recognized as ethnically coded in our society, those
signals of ethnic identification are not stable in the Muppet Theatre.
From penguins to pickles, the performers on The Muppet Show can
perform a wide range of entertainments because they can elude questions of ‘‘authenticity’’ or ‘‘appropriation’’ in a way that no human
performer can. The ethnic and racial identities of the human puppeteers effectively fade from the stage, giving the Muppets the freedom of
performing across racial and ethnic boundaries, without the condescension or grotesque caricature that traditionally accompanied such
performances. The result is a show that celebrates a diverse cultural
history of entertainment that is open for all to share and enjoy, whether
one is animal, vegetable, or mineral. The Muppet Show has inherited
‘‘variety’’ as a show business ideal, dating back to the old vaudeville
promise of ‘‘something for everyone,’’ but it also turns it into a social
ideal and puts it in the service of a multicultural ideology.
Cultural norms are arguably more evident in the performance of
gender roles among the Muppets. There are some Muppets that avoid
gender distinction because they are extras and chorus members rather
than full-fledged characters. But while groups of penguins, sheep, and
vegetables may remain ungendered, nearly every other Muppet is
The Performance of Nonconformity on The Muppet Show
829
clearly male or female. From the very beginning of the show, gender
divisions are firmly in place: a line of dancing female Muppets sings the
first verse of the opening theme, followed by a line of dancing male
Muppets who sing the second verse. The male Muppets represent a
wide range of personality types, but among the nearly thirty Muppets
who appear regularly on the show, only two of them are female. This
stands in marked contrast with the gender parity of the show’s guest
stars: women make up approximately 50% of the celebrity headliners.
Statistically, females made up a mere 22% of the characters in children’s television programming in the 1970s, making The Muppet Show
under-average when it comes to its regular cast, but above-average
when it comes to guest stars (Barcus 33). Bearing the burden of female
representation, Miss Piggy and Janice are singular characters in the
otherwise male-dominated Muppet Theatre, and an analysis of their
performances will illuminate the ways in which The Muppet Show both
conforms to and subverts gender norms.
Miss Piggy is the female star of The Muppet Show, and her personality
is informed by the stereotype of the diva: deluded about her own fame
and talent, jealous of other female performers, sweet and seductive
when in need, harsh and aggressive when denied. She carries a torch for
Kermit, and his rejection of her affection often causes her to lash out
violently against him. The large woman chasing the small man is a
staple of comedy dating back to ancient times, and Miss Piggy and
Kermit reenact it weekly. Miss Piggy’s status as a romantically frustrated leading lady and Kermit’s position as the reluctant object of
desire change radically for some of the feature films, including The
Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets
Take Manhattan (1984). While the episodic format of the television
series demands the continuing possibility of romantic coupling, and
therefore the continuing comic postponement of it, the dramatic arc of
the feature film demands a conclusion of romantic fulfillment, with
Miss Piggy and Kermit uniting as a couple by the end of the film. The
running gag of one genre becomes the dramatic climax of another.
Miss Piggy’s exaggerated ego and her corpulence make her the butt
of many jokes, but she is also remarkable for the crafty and persistent
way in which she pushes her way into the spotlight. When Mark
Hammill of Star Wars appears on the show, she takes the initiative and
dresses up as Princess Leia. When Elton John performs ‘‘Don’t Go
Breaking My Heart,’’ Miss Piggy joins him in the duet, snarling ‘‘Eat
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your heart out, Kiki!’’ She even corners Rudolf Nureyev in a steam
room and practically rips his towel away from him. Miss Piggy’s performance of diva femininity mixed with her aggression and physical
prowess might put the viewer in mind not so much of a 1970s feminist
but of an old fashioned drag queen. And in a certain sense Miss Piggy is
a drag queen. Initially played by Richard Hunt and then by Frank
Oz, Miss Piggy has always been the creation of a male puppeteer.
She regularly uses drag queen shtick, such as comically switching
from a high-pitched feminine coo to a basso profundo masculine growl.
The persona of Miss Piggy, then, sends out mixed messages about the
role of the female performer, since her diva femininity is consistently
highlighted as a performance. ‘‘Miss Piggy the Star’’ is the creation of
Miss Piggy the performer, and either despite or because of her stereotypical affectations, she is one of the most beloved Muppet creations. Indeed, she has become the star that she pretends to be.
The other regular female performer is the house band’s lead
guitarist, Janice. With her ‘‘groovy’’ California accent, full lips, stringy
blond hair, and mellow attitude, Janice seems less like her namesake
Janis Joplin and more a combination of Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell,
and Stevie Nicks. She regularly plays and sings with her band mates,
and there seems to be no anxiety around her position as the only female
member of the band—she is simply ‘‘one of the boys.’’ Although she
also spent most of her career on the arm of a male puppeteer, Janice
differs from Miss Piggy by avoiding the stereotypical drag queen’s
performance of exaggerated femininity. While Miss Piggy is often defined by her desperate pursuit of the opposite sex, Janice seems coolly
unconcerned with heterosexual attachments—her identity can stand on
its own. She may sometimes conform to gender expectations, such as
playing a nurse in ‘‘Veterinarian’s Hospital,’’ but Janice succeeds in
performing a female identity that is not restricted by stereotypical
conventions of femininity.
Although there are other female Muppets (including the ambitious
ingénue Annie Sue Pig, performed by female puppeteer Louise Gold),
they do not appear regularly or in large roles. But even in these cases, it
is worth asking what actually constitutes gender? How does an audience determine the gender of puppets? Clothes and hairstyles are
usually the key indicators of gender, and female Muppets often have
long eyelashes or red lips to mark them as female. A character’s name
and vocal register also serve as indicators, as does his or her relationship
The Performance of Nonconformity on The Muppet Show
831
to the other characters or guest stars: Sylvester Stallone’s Muppet
groupies are all female; Debbie Harry’s Muppet groupies are all male.7
With this strict gender division comes a compulsory heterosexuality
that exists across species and can often be surprisingly risqué, such as
when a scantily clad Raquel Welch sings a sexually provocative song to
Fozzie Bear and then invites him up to her dressing room.
Yet gender performance on The Muppet Show is not always so rigid.
Some guest stars cross gender lines in performance, such as Marty
Feldman playing Princess Sheherazade, although he is clearly a ‘‘man in
a dress’’ and avoids any hint of a romantic same-sex pairing. The one
Muppet who most often breaks with gender conventions and engages in
same-sex pairing is Gonzo. Gonzo looks something like a cross between
Grover from Sesame Street and a buzzard, but he belongs to no particular
species. Gonzo’s performances run the gamut from the bizarre to the
surreal: from bomb dismantling and gorilla wrestling to singing chickens and dancing cheese. The ambiguity of his species and the weirdness
of his performances mark Gonzo as the ‘‘freak’’ of the already freaky
Muppet family. Just as he seems blissfully unaware of what others
consider good entertainment, Gonzo is unaware of the social norms of
masculine heterosexuality. Therefore he often finds himself on the
wrong side of the gender fence. Sometimes Gonzo is romantically paired
with a female chicken named Camilla, but more often Gonzo is a lone
‘‘weirdo’’ with ambiguous gender/sexual/species status.8
A notable example of Gonzo’s sexual nonconformity occurs during
the episode in which he pairs everyone into couples for a dance marathon. Kermit does not have anyone to dance with, so Gonzo offers
himself as a partner, saying ‘‘I’ll lead,’’ taking Kermit in his arms, and
telling him ‘‘You look lovely tonight.’’ Gonzo performs the clichéd
lines of the leading man, seemingly unaware that there is anything
wrong or absurd about his choice of another man as a partner. The
laugh track tells us otherwise. The same-sex pairing of Kermit and
Gonzo is played for comedy, and it is eventually ‘‘set straight’’ by
Kermit’s frantic bid for heteronormativity: at first he refuses to dance
with Miss Piggy, but he changes his mind, clinging to the drag diva in
order to avoid dancing with Gonzo. Nevertheless, the Muppet Theatre
is a place where gender roles are provisionally destabilized, allowing for
‘‘queer play’’ of varying degrees of silliness and seriousness.
In at least one case, Gonzo ‘‘gets his man’’ in a duet that begins as a
joke but ends in a surprising approximation of genuine affection. Guest
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star Gene Kelly is backstage, singing a sweetly romantic song with
Miss Piggy, but in the middle of it, Gonzo enters.
Gonzo: Miss Piggy, you’ve got to change for ‘‘Pigs in Space.’’
Miss Piggy: Oh, oh, Gene, I’m so sorry. I must go. Ta! [exits]
Kelly: But we haven’t finished our song.
Gonzo: That’s okay. You can sing it to me. [He throws himself into
Kelly’s arms.] What’s it called?
Kelly: ‘‘You Wonderful You’’
Gonzo: Perfect! [He bats his eyes at Kelly.]
Kelly: I don’t think it’ll be the same . . .
They sing the rest of the song together, gazing into each other’s eyes,
and Kelly playfully pokes Gonzo’s protruding nose at the end of the
song. Kelly may wink at the camera and tell us ‘‘it won’t be the same,’’
but for all intents and purposes his performance is the same, even
though two male characters are now filling the positions in a heterosexual romance. What could have been a homophobic joke ends up as a
sweet scene of affection between these two characters, and while I
would stop short of calling the scene ‘‘gay,’’ I find it undeniably queer
in its playful transgression of compulsory heterosexuality. This scene
also highlights the reason why the Muppets often ‘‘get away’’ with this
sort of boundary-defying play: although they are all supposedly adults,
in stature and behavior the Muppets seem like playful children, standing only chest-high next to the real adult guest stars.9 Gonzo is a queer
bird, but he is not threatening because there is a child-like innocence
to his lack of conformity: he simply does not know any better.
Or does he? The Muppets take on a truly subversive edge when they
underscore their unruliness by placing themselves against the stern
moralizing of the show’s self-appointed authority figure, Sam the Eagle, who exists in lieu of any parent, because nuclear families have no
place in this theatre. Sam is a large blue bald eagle with a beak that
curls downward in an intimidating frown. He is the show’s cultural
watchdog who chastises Kermit for booking ‘‘weird’’ acts instead of
highbrow, respectable entertainment. Being a cross between Uncle Sam
and America’s national bird with a dash of Richard Nixon, Sam the
Eagle represents a conservative, nationalist puritanism that makes him
both a snob and a prude. As such, he is ripe for comic humiliation. A
case in point is Sam’s backstage protest against the flamboyant and
‘‘freaky’’ Elton John:
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833
Sam: Kermit, about this Elton John. I have seen some pretty weird
guests on this show, but this Elton John borders on the revolutionary.
Kermit: Well, Sam, Elton John is a very important musician.
Sam: Then why does he dress like a stolen car?
Kermit: Uh, Sam, musicians have always been fancy dressers.
Sam: Mozart wasn’t.
Kermit: Mozart wore high heels and wigs and silk stockings.
Sam: Hold your little green tongue!
Kermit: It’s true, Sam.
Sam: If Mozart wore high heels, wigs, and stockings, I’ll eat my hat.
Kermit: And give Elton John a big introduction?
Sam: That too.
Scooter: [entering with framed portrait] Hey, guys, look at this great picture
of Mozart Elton John gave me. Love those high heels and silk stockings.
Sam: What?
Scooter: You know, Sam, you’d look great in a powdered wig.
Sam: Good grief, I’ve been hornswaggled!
Popular culture wins its victory by bridging the false gap between art and
entertainment: Mozart and Elton John are kindred spirits. It is no mistake that Sam takes particular exception to John. In 1976, two years
before his Muppet Show appearance, John came out as bisexual in a
Rolling Stone interview, making him one of the most famous queer people
on the planet (Garber 145). Elton John’s sexual nonconformity remains
unspoken on the show but is coded in the queerness of his costumes and
his performance. Sam sees John’s presence as a threat to patriarchal normativity, but he is fighting a losing battle; by the end of the show, all the
Muppets, including Sam, are wearing outrageous costumes in a glam
rainbow of glitter and plumes. With John as their guide, Kermit and his
theatrical troupe position themselves within the long tradition of imagining the artist, particularly the performing artist, outside the realm of
‘‘normal’’ society. To be a performer is to be a freak, and both those
‘‘queer’’ roles are regularly celebrated on The Muppet Show.
Because it is beyond the scope of this analysis to make any claims
regarding the ways in which The Muppet Show ‘‘influenced’’ children in
the 1970s, ultimately I can speak only for myself when I say that The
Muppet Show greatly informed my love of live theatre and popular
culture at an early age, and in retrospect I believe it may have even
helped me accept and enjoy my ‘‘queer’’ feelings of being unlike other
children, of being a ‘‘weirdo’’ facing a hostile audience in a chaotic
world. As a child, I knew that every Sunday night, I could witness the
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triumph of the weirdoes in the Muppet Theatre, and in my imagination
become one of them and join in their triumph. Over the last three
decades, the original generation of Muppet viewers grew up, the Muppets left the Muppet Theatre to make other television shows and films,
and Jim Henson died in 1990 at the age of fifty-three. The artistic,
cultural, and social sensibilities of Henson’s Muppet Show are certainly a
product of their particular time, yet these shows still have the ability to
entertain and to convey the joys of nonconformity. In a world where
dissent and difference seem increasingly endangered, where once marginalized groups want nothing more than normalcy and a place at the
table, perhaps ‘‘it’s time to play the music/it’s time to light the lights.’’
NOTES
I would like to thank Rachel Cohen, Libby Garland, Richard Renfro, David Savran, and David
Zellnik for reading and offering insightful and supportive criticism of previous drafts of this
article. I am also indebted to David Duckworth and the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture
Association, as well as Jill Dolan and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
1. Finch’s definitive history of Henson and the Muppets is also a valuable trove of visual information, reproducing hundreds of photographs, drawings, and stills. Finch’s Of Muppets and
Men also contains a thorough account of the creation and production of The Muppet Show. My
own overview of Muppet history is indebted to his excellent scholarship.
2. The Muppet Show participates in two of the interpretive/creative strategies specified by John
Fiske as major components of popular culture: parody and bricolage. In Understanding Popular
Culture, Fiske writes that the creators of popular culture ‘‘treat the text with profound disrespect: it is not a superior object created by a superior producer-artist (as is the bourgeois
text), but a cultural resource to be raided or poached’’ (144 – 45). Bricolage, then, is the
recombining and reusing of these poached cultural products, often subverting old meanings or
creating new ones (150) (John Fiske, 1989).
3. The anarchy of the Muppet Theatre can also be understood through Mikhail Bahktin’s notion
of the ‘‘carnivalesque.’’ The Muppet Show often playfully subverts social norms, particularly
through the inversion of power structures, and certain characters emphasize bodily function
and appetite, particularly the Reubenesque and sexually voracious Miss Piggy and the iddriven omnivorous drummer, Animal. See Robert Stam (1989).
4. Jane Feuer argues that the illusion of a backstage ‘‘folk community’’ of entertainers serves to
counteract the crass commercialism of mass-produced entertainment. See Jane Feuer (1993).
5. In using the term ‘‘queer’’ in this way, I am following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of work
that ‘‘spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and
sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and
other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses’’ (8 – 9). The term ‘‘queer’’ interrogates assumptions about empirical categories of identity and acknowledges that the actual
qualities and components of individual identities cannot always ‘‘be made to line up neatly
together’’ (13). See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993).
6. Barcus did not include The Muppet Show in his data, but his statistics based on other programs
accurately reflect racial representation on this show. Among the nonwhite guest stars are Rita
Moreno, Lena Horne, Ben Vereen, Lou Rawls, Pearl Bailey, Harry Belafonte, Leslie Uggams,
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Dizzy Gillespie, Lola Falana, Diana Ross, Shirley Bassey, and Gladys Night. I do not include
performers such as Lynda Carter, Linda Ronstadt, and Raquel Welch, who had not incorporated their Hispanic heritage into their star personae at this time.
7. Sam Abel tackles a similar dynamic in his analysis of American animated cartoons: ‘‘Masculinity is simply the assumed norm. A female character in these cartoons must be constructed
specifically as female, either by added dress, movement and voice [. . .], or by a gender-specific
role in relation to a child or male partner. In the absence of such a construction, the character
becomes male by default’’ (Sam Abel, 1995).
8. In a joke from the Muppet franchise’s newspaper comic strip, written by Guy and Brad
Gilchrist, Gonzo walks by a bathroom door marked ‘‘Women,’’ then walks by a door marked
‘‘Men,’’ and finally walks through a door marked ‘‘Whatever’’ (Finch 150).
9. Kermit’s nephew Robin and the teenage gopher Scooter are the only nonadult Muppets who
appear regularly on the show.
Works Cited
Abel, Sam. ‘‘The Rabbit in Drag: Camp and Gender Construction in
the American Animated Cartoon.’’ The Journal of Popular Culture
29.3 (Winter 1995): 183 – 202.
Barcus, Earle F. Images of Life on Children’s Television: Sex Roles, Minorities, and Families. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983.
Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Finch, Christopher. Jim Henson: The Works—the Art, the Magic, the
Imagination. New York: Random House, 1993.
———. Of Muppets and Men. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989.
Garber, Marjorie. Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Palmer, Edward L. Television & America’s Children: A Crisis of Neglect.
New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bahktin, Cultural Criticism, and Film.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
Jordan Schildcrout is an assistant professor of Theater History, Criticism, and
Dramaturgy at Ohio University. After earning his BA in Literature from Yale
University, he worked as a literary manager and dramaturg for Manhattan
Theatre Club and Adobe Theatre Company. He earned his PhD in Theater
from the Graduate Center of CUNY, where he also worked for the Center for
Lesbian and Gay Studies. His current book project is about homicidal
homosexuals on the American stage.