The weird history of treating the Muppets like real people
Last month, during the Television Critics Association press tour, entertainment writer Devin Faraci filed a grumpy brief about how journalists were treating two potential sources during panels: specifically, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, the puppets whose volatile romantic relationship is at the heart of the ABC reality show satire “The Muppets,” which premieres Tuesday night.
“When the newly rebooted Muppet movie came out it was darling to see members of the press interview the Muppets themselves, to talk to these felt puppets as if they were real people. Because in some way they are real people to us; the Muppets have been an integral part of the American cultural fabric since the 1970s, and the characters created by Jim Henson and his team have rightfully ascended into the shared iconography of not just our nation but of much of the Western world,” Faraci wrote of the panel for “The Muppets” at press tour.
But “Kermit and Miss Piggy breaking up wasn’t a story on the new show, mind you. This isn’t like when the press reports on the death of Superman or Green Lantern (Earth 2) coming out of the closet. It isn’t a story about the narrative of these characters, it’s a story about the meta-narrative – Miss Piggy and Kermit have broken up behind the scenes of their new show, on which they are playing characters based on themselves.”
I don’t disagree with Faraci that “when you’re talking to a puppet all you’re going to get are soundbites and jokes that promote the show instead of illuminating it.” But the tradition of journalists talking to the Muppets as if they’re actual people is far older than the 2011 reboot of the franchise, spearheaded by comedian Jason Segel. And the long practice of treating the Muppets as humans suggests that while Jim Henson’s creations may be satirizing reality television, they also did a little something to set up the system they’re about to parody.
Early press clippings for characters like Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog speak of them as creations. “The English have gone positively crackers for Mr. Henson’s bizarre puppet creatures and their weekly half-hour of whimsy and music-hall comedy,” Les Brown wrote in a piece about the Muppet phenomenon in 1978.
But the transition to thinking of the Muppets as actual people started early, among civilians and journalists alike. Later in 1978, Kermit the Frog was invited to speak at the funeral of voice actor Edgar Bergen, along with Kermit creator Henson, who acknowledged the oddness of the situation. Students at Whitney Junior High School in Oklahoma enrolled Miss Piggy in their Parent-Teacher Association in 1980, along with human celebrities like Amy Carter, Erma Bombeck and Jane Fonda.
Later that year, fashion critic Francesca Stanfill interviewed Miss Piggy about what she wore when she watched television at home – as if the pig were a person, quoting her as saying, “I always wear a simple angora sweater with a flared skirt. And, of course, my elbow-length lavender evening gloves. I find this brings out the animal in my frog.”
In a piece about the artificiality of the Oscars and other supposedly spontaneous television events, Tom Wicker noted that “from some seats, those in the show looked no larger than puppets, while Miss Piggy could scarcely be seen at all,” employing wordplay, though perhaps missing a more significant connection to his theme of unreality.
The Muppets have been listed as authors of best-selling books and credited as performers in variety shows without reference to the humans whose work makes their existence possible. Journalists seem to snap back and remember that Kermit, Miss Piggy and their counterparts are creations only in stories about puppetry technique.
But the Muppets are hardly the only fictional characters to be covered on this sort of dual level.
If you look at coverage of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and its various spin-offs, the franchise gets treated in a number of ways, depending on what the audience wants. There are straightforward stories that treat the drama of individual episodes as if they represent real, naturalistic events in the lives of the featured family members, many of them driven by the E! network’s punishing publicity machine. And there are process-oriented stories, like the New York Times profile of family matriarch Kris Jenner, which acknowledge that the Kardashians have lives and personalities at least moderately distinct from their onscreen personas.
And with Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition, revealed earlier this year, there was a third level of coverage that parsed the gap between the onscreen story, what seemed to be a distinct reality that could be reported on, and the relationship between that reality and the business plan that creates the glossy product.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Muppets helped get us used to that kind of cognitive dissonance, a collective leap into treating the fictional as real. I’m absolutely with Faraci that there’s great entertainment journalism to be done in figuring out how to construct that facade and make it work, and what it means for human performers to essentially live as cloth-and-stuffing creations with profiles much higher than our own.
But we should also remember, in assessing “The Muppets,” that the characters are adding a weird extra dimension to the layer cake that is reality television. This is a particular pop culture franchise that has limited room to critique the genre, given how much it did to train us to play our roles in the ecosystem that supports an odd substitution of fiction for reality.