Jokes That Kermit
Wouldn’t Dare Tell
By ANDREW
WALLENSTEIN
NY Times
As a practitioner of
puppetry, the Jim Henson Company doesn’t often ply
its trade at comedy clubs. But the puppet show the
company staged for a few weekends this summer at the
Improv in Los Angeles wasn’t a typical production.
For one thing, the
puppeteers weren’t hidden. They performed in full
view, with their puppets held over their heads for a
camera to capture and project to television monitors
next to the stage. And instead of following a script,
the Henson troupe improvised skits, with audience
members encouraged to chime in their own story ideas.
This being a comedy
club, those ideas weren’t exactly what the Henson
Company might have used on “The Muppet Show” or
“Sesame Street.” Asked to suggest a career for a
skit about a job interview, one audience member
proposed proctology; the performance featured a large
gorilla puppet re-enacting the kind of painful probes
common in that medical specialty.
Who would have
thought that the company that introduced the phrase
“It’s not easy being green” would be working
blue? It’s just one of the ways a production company
known for beloved child-friendly franchises is trying
to find a new creative spark.
 Brian
Henson — co-chief executive, with his sister, Lisa
Henson, and a puppeteer at the company his father
founded — wants to restore the company’s past
glory. “We lost our position as funny, popular
entertainment in the prime-time arena, so I’m trying
to get back there,” he said. “To do that and be
innovative, we have to really establish a new
voice.”
He is making
progress. TBS is taping a Henson improv performance
scheduled for Wednesday at the Comedy Festival in Las
Vegas, and will show it as an hourlong special titled
“Puppet Up! Uncensored” on Nov. 20. In addition
TBS has ordered 30 episodes of "Uncensored"
for its coming broadband channel. The network is also
considering a semi-improvisational late-night talk
show in which everyone is a puppet except for the
human celebrity guests.
Another project the
Henson Company is shopping around is “Tinseltown,”
concerning a gay puppet couple balancing work in
Hollywood with life as parents of an adopted human
son. In the five-minute presentation tape for “Tinseltown,”
Bobby is a margarita-swilling pig with a raspy lisp,
and his partner is a bull named Samson. When their
sullen 12-year-old son plucks a beer from the
refrigerator, Bobby dismisses Samson’s concern,
telling him, “Oh, it was a light beer.”
With its new adult
direction, the company is latching onto a cable trend.
MTV2’s “Wonder Showzen” has made ample use of
the genre, and the channel is also bringing back the
puppet pranksters of “Crank Yankers,” which
originally ran on Comedy Central. IFC has revived
“Greg the Bunny” to parody popular films, and next
year Starz is importing a different racy rabbit,
“The Bronx Bunny,” from British television.
Back at Henson the
multiple projects make for a busy time at its
headquarters, a five-acre lot in Hollywood that
doesn’t quite fit in with the seedier elements of
the neighborhood, just south of Sunset Boulevard.
Inside a converted farmhouse on the grounds, an
employee creates a new female character, Gina
Cappellini, meant for one of the resident puppeteers,
Julianne Buescher, who slides the puppet-in-progress
over her hand. Gina’s eyes have yet to be glued on;
they’re still trying to perfect her sloe-eyed
expression with the help of an Angelina Jolie photo
pinned to the wall.
The Henson Company
has been at this address since 2000, the latest tenant
in the bungalows Charlie Chaplin built for his own
studio in 1917. The current occupants pay tribute to
him at the central gate with a statue of Kermit the
Frog dressed in Chaplin’s signature bowler and cane.
But Kermit is no longer a priority for Mr. Henson
since he sold the rights to the Muppets franchise to
the Walt Disney Company in 2004. While Disney is
likely to call on the Henson Company to produce future
incarnations of the Muppets, their corporate adoption
has freed Mr. Henson to focus on creating new
characters that could become franchises in their own
right.
“It’s liberated
me from needing to service that because having the
Muppets becomes a big, big deal,” Mr. Henson said.
“It’s consumer products, it’s publishing, all
that stuff.”
His company remains
active in other children’s properties — like
development of a feature-film adaptation of its 1980s
show “Fraggle Rock” — and is also interested in
coming up with the kind of production that appeals to
all ages, as its syndicated variety series “The
Muppet Show” did on CBS stations from 1976 to 1981.
There were several attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to
recapture that magic, with mixed results.
That’s when the
notion that improvised comedy could be a source of
creative resurgence arose. “One thing that occurred
to me in the last few years was that that spark
wasn’t there anymore and that we were really
sticking to the script,” Mr. Henson said.
Improv was also
something of a necessity: the company was having
difficulty attracting writers to dream up puppet-based
material. Mr. Henson also wanted to see his puppeteers
ad-libbing more, the way the earlier generation that
gave voice to “The Muppet Show” often did.
The current corps was
in agreement that sometimes the funniest scenes
occurred off camera. Bill Barretta, a puppeteer who
has worked closely with Mr. Henson for 15 years,
recalled cracking up people on the set between takes.
“We’d cut from a scene, and I’d make it so my
character had way too much to drink, and he’d start
cursing at the crew,” Mr. Barretta said. “It would
break up the tension and remind us that we’re there
to have fun.”
It was that kind of
impromptu performance that Mr. Henson said was
essential to recovering the company’s voice. He
turned to Patrick Bristow, an actor and instructor at
the Los Angeles improv company the Groundlings, for
help a few years ago. Though initially dubious that
puppetry and improv could be married, Mr. Bristow
began teaching the puppeteers how to string together
stories on the fly from audience suggestions. Paying
attention to the motions of a puppet while clearing
the mind for free-associative creativity is not for
the faint at heart, Mr. Bristow discovered. As he
described the practice, “it’s like parts of the
brain that never spoke to each other are screaming,
‘Hey! Over here!’ ”
The first few weeks
of training were difficult, Mr. Bristow remembered,
and one discouraged puppeteer even dropped out.
Puppetry doesn’t exactly lend itself to
improvisation, which traditionally emphasizes eye
contact between the performers. The Henson puppeteers
have to stare at monitors on the floor in order to see
their puppets move; their brand of improvisation
forces them to listen intently. “At first it was
pretty challenging, to say the least,” Ms. Buescher
recalled.
In time Mr. Bristow
felt they were ready for a performance. When Mr.
Henson recommended his lot’s soundstage, Mr. Bristow
had little idea that it would not be an intimate
gathering. “They rented bleachers and served wine,
cheese and crackers,” Mr. Bristow remembered. “No
pressure or anything.” The crowd included a
representative from the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, who
invited the puppeteers to perform in March in Aspen,
Colo.
Improvisation has
also helped the staff mold the identity of puppets
from scratch. Ms. Buescher began taking a liking to a
diapered pug she named Piddles. The puppet displays an
impish charm and, on occasion, uncontrollable gas.
“Eventually you fall in love with one of them, and
you make them your own,” she said. “I love
Piddles. She’s so innocent but so filthy and
dark.”
Those aren’t
exactly the adjectives that come to mind in describing
the legacy of Jim Henson, who died in 1990. But his
son said that the company’s success in
family-friendly entertainment had obscured Jim
Henson’s more irreverent work earlier in his career.
In the 1960s Jim Henson’s puppet humor included the
occasional sexual innuendo and drug references; his
creations were even featured on the first season of
“Saturday Night Live.”
“Because of
‘Sesame Street’ people thought of him as a
children’s performer,” Brian Henson said. “It
was sort of odd for him because he was until then an
adult performer.”
But while the
father’s earlier work may have foreshadowed the
son’s new direction, Mr. Henson emphasized that
being offensive was not the point. “We didn’t set
out to do risqué adult-exclusive content,” he said.
“What we did set out to do is to forget all the
rules of the 8 p.m. sensibility, what puppets do that
aren’t in preschool, and instead let’s just do
what we as puppeteers think is the funniest thing we
can do in the moment.” |
