Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Music would be an important part of The Muppet Show, and Jim chose the songs to be performed on the show with the same relish with which he had once chosen records for Sam and Friends. Each week he would sort eagerly through Tin Pan Alley sheet music and old songbooks—including old favorites Songs of the Pogo and A. A. Milne’s Pooh Song Book—as well as scouring the current Top 40 charts for songs with unusual or catchy hooks. Consequently, The Muppet Show’s first season alone featured an impressive array of songs reflecting Jim’s quirky musical sensibilities, rolling through traditional tunes like the vaudeville-era “You and I and George,” A. A. Milne’s rollicking “Cottleston Pie,” Latham and Jaffe’s novelty tune “I’m My Own Grandpa,” and Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Tit Willow” (a selection that prompted a confused Sam the Eagle to ask, “Is it cultural?”).

  When it came to popular music, Jim’s personal tastes had mellowed slightly with time; while he may have looked like he would be right at home lounging in a beanbag chair listening to 1970s stadium rock through oversized headphones, he actually preferred so-called adult contemporary artists like Jim Croce, James Taylor, and Billy Joel. Still, even when selecting songs from the mellower side of the Top 40, Jim could make some surprising choices, pulling deep cuts and obscure B-sides rather than the more familiar chart toppers. After listening to Barry Manilow’s 1976 album This One’s for You, for example, Jim opted to use “Jump Shout Boogie” for The Muppet Show rather than any of the album’s four Top 40 hits.

  After Music Hall and a break for lunch, rehearsal and blocking would take up the rest of the day—but Jim was always in and out of the rehearsal room, huddling with the writing team during lunch in the canteen, running over to the editing room to check on the progress of last week’s episode, or in the Muppet workshop consulting on costuming needs. “[Jim] worked the hardest of anybody,” said Lazer. “He was in the writers’ meetings, he was in the performers’ meetings, in the scenery meetings. He was in every possible meeting, constantly.” By the time the lights went out at Elstree at 7:00 P.M. on Sunday night, the Muppet team had been at work for nine hours. And that, said Juhl, was “a light day.”

  On Monday began what the Muppet crew affectionately termed “Band Day,” which started in the morning with the ATV studio musicians—conducted by Jack Parnell, a former big band drummer and bandleader who had served as ATV’s musical director for twenty years—recording the music for that week’s songs. During these sessions, the band would also record several isolated music tracks—just drums or bass or piano or sax—that each puppeteer who performed a musician would be given to listen to on their own. This way Jerry Nelson and Richard Hunt, for example, could familiarize themselves with the bass or the lead guitar solos so they could make their performances that much more convincing. Jim, for one, took great pride in his ability to make Rowlf or Dr. Teeth convincingly play the piano, listening to their performances on the tape deck in his car on his way into Elstree each morning. “I’m really enjoying it,” he reported. “I haven’t played piano for years.”

  Once the band had completed its work, the Muppet performers would gather in the main band room to begin recording their vocals. While all dialogue on the show would be performed live during the taping of the show, the songs would almost always be recorded in advance to ensure the song would sound the same—and the Muppet performers’ voices would remain intact—over multiple takes. Recording sessions could last anywhere from an hour to half a day—but Jim used much of the day to meet with Burns, Juhl, and the rest of the writing team to review scripts and talk through ideas for upcoming episodes.

  The Muppet writers each had different strengths and writing styles that would shape both the show and the characters—sometimes through trial and error—as the show progressed from year to year. Writer Don Hinkley had a knack for puns and verbal wordplay—and was, in the minds of many, the funniest guy in the room—while quick-writing Mark London, a veteran of Laugh-In, was a workhorse who wrote straight-ahead comedy routines, like the soap opera spoof “Veterinarian’s Hospital.” Head writer Jack Burns understood how to put together a show, though he tended to think of episodes as a series of roughly strung together vignettes, with no underlying story gluing the episode together. Instead, regular routines like “Veterinarian’s Hospital” or “At the Dance,” in which couples waltzed past the camera and told jokes, were mostly just pushed together, giving the shows a rhythm, but no cohesion. That would change in the second season, with the removal of Burns and the promotion of Juhl to head writer. Juhl’s first order of business: “We phased out that ballroom dancing thing,” said Juhl, “partly because everybody hated to write for it, and everybody hated to perform it … it was boring kind of writing. Pointless one-liners. No character and no motivation of any kind.”

  For Juhl, the former Muppet performer, it was character and motivation that mattered more than puns or vaudeville-style jokes—a predilection Jim and the puppeteers appreciated. “What he always seemed to do best was to watch … us develop our characters and then write along those lines,” said Hunt. In the writing room, however, Jim was adamant that “these puppets are not just characters up there telling jokes. If you just stand there and tell jokes,” he continued, “the whole thing will die. The humor only holds if there’s visual interaction between the characters.”

  That visual interaction, however, was sometimes difficult for Jim to articulate. “How the characters play a particular moment on a punch line is very visual,” Jim would insist. “The whole concept of the comedy take is totally visual. Even deadpan comedians are very visual.” And yet, Jim couldn’t always explain exactly what he meant by visual. Jim knew when sketches or jokes worked—and when they didn’t, he usually knew why—but expressing his views in the writers’ room could often be excruciating for everyone involved. “He would drive [the writers] crazy,” said Juhl, “because he would know that what was on the page wasn’t what he wanted. But he couldn’t quite know what he wanted—or if he did know what he wanted, he wouldn’t quite know how to tell you.” And so writers’ meetings could stretch on, sometimes for hours, with bursts of enthusiastic conversation followed by long periods of silence as Jim tried to come up with just the right way to describe what he was looking for.

  Often, the biggest source of disagreement was over what Juhl called “the implied joke,” in which a joke is set up on-screen, “and then the punch line happens off camera … somebody walks out and you hear the whole thing collapse.” Jim thought that was throwing away a perfectly good punch line. “We can show that!” he would insist, appealing to the writers with his huge hands spread outward—and then he and the writing team would go around and around again. “There would be fairly heated arguments,” said Juhl. “We would try to make the case that actually not seeing it would be funnier. And he hated that argument. He could see the logic in it, but he didn’t want to give in to it.” Jim would only slouch lower in his chair and hmmmm; an implied joke, he thought, was not only a waste of a joke, but a waste of the puppets themselves. “Most TV humor is verbal. Somebody says something to somebody and somebody else replies,” he explained. “But with puppets, you do a funny kind of character, and that’s the joke. That’s where the humor arises. Often, the best pieces don’t look like anything on paper.”

  Now that they were all working together in London, Jim and Juhl, as promised, had slowly but surely helped Oz get a better handle on Fozzie Bear. Jim had directed the Muppet builders to modify the puppet, slightly changing Fozzie’s color to a brighter orange, removing the unreliable mechanism that wiggled Fozzie’s ears, and remodeling the mouth to get rid of the downturned corners that gave the early version of the character a perpetual grimace. From a writing perspective, said Juhl, the real trick was to take “Fozzie’s ineptness … [and] make that entertaining and wonderful.” Oz, too, was beginning to change the way he performed the character, and at Jim’s urging had somewhat modified the voice, sliding up to a slightly higher register and a more excited delivery. Oz
had also decided that Fozzie, rather than being a victim, was just “a simple guy who wants to be funny and loved.”

  Yet, Fozzie continued to struggle as the fall guy—until the character suddenly and wonderfully fell into place. In a sketch worthy of Abbott and Costello, Fozzie asks Kermit for help in telling a joke, convincing the frog to act as his straight man. “When you hear me say the word ‘hear,’ ” Fozzie tells Kermit carefully, “you will rush up to me and say, ‘Good grief! The comedian’s a bear!’ ” Kermit agrees—and over the next ninety seconds, Fozzie’s best-laid plans come quickly unraveled:

  FOZZIE: Okay, here we go … ready?… (faces audience) Now then: Hiya hiya hiya! You’re a wonderful looking audience, it’s a pleasure to be here. I—

  KERMIT (rushing in): Good grief! The comedian’s a bear!

  FOZZIE: Not yet!

  KERMIT: But you just said “here”…

  FOZZIE: That was the wrong “hear”!

  KERMIT: Which is the right “hear”?

  FOZZIE: The other “hear”! Go, go … (pushing Kermit offstage) Okay—hey hey folks! This is a story you guys’ll love to hear.…

  KERMIT (rushing in): Good grief! The comedian’s a bear!

  FOZZIE: Will you stop that?!?

  KERMIT: But you said “hear”!

  FOZZIE: Not that “hear”!

  KERMIT: Well which “hear”?

  FOZZIE: Another “hear”!

  KERMIT: How am I gonna know?!?

  FOZZIE: You’ll know when you hear!

  KERMIT: Good grief! The comedian’s a bear!

  And so on, at which point the punch line—“No he’s-a not! He’s-a wearin’ a necka tie!”—is nearly beside the point. While it was a defining moment for the character, it very nearly didn’t make it before the cameras. It had been written quickly—“We sent the material down on the floor just a few minutes before they were gonna tape it,” recalled Juhl—and taped toward the end of the day when Jim and Oz had little time to rehearse. After reading through it once, Jim and Oz put Kermit and Fozzie on their arms, and completed the complicated sketch in one remarkable take. “They just played the hell out of it,” said Juhl admiringly, “and suddenly Fozzie was wonderful. I remember that moment and saying, ‘Now there’s a character there!’ ”

  It was indeed a wonderful moment—but it wouldn’t have worked without Kermit, played by Jim at his most delightfully and arm-wavingly frantic, frazzled, and frustrated. Many television critics, writing of Kermit during that pivotal first season, thought Kermit was already one of Hollywood’s great straight men—“funny not because of what he does,” wrote one reviewer, “but because of what others do around him, and because of the aplomb with which he bears their doings.” That was true to some extent, but Kermit was more than a mere straight man; he was the sun around which the entire Muppet solar system revolved. “He relates to the other characters on many different levels,” said Juhl. “More important, they have to relate to him. Without Kermit, they don’t work. Nothing could happen without him. The other characters do not have what it takes to hold things together.”

  The same could be said of Jim, although Jim was always wary of letting the press view him and Kermit interchangeably. “There’s a bit of me in Kermit,” Jim conceded. “Kermit’s the organizer, always desperately trying to keep things going while surrounded by all these crazy nuts,” he explained to London’s TV Times. “I suppose he is not unlike me and it’s not unlike the way the place operates around here.” Mostly, Jim saw both himself and Kermit as the steady eye of the Muppet Show hurricane, the center around which the storm wildly raged and revolved—though steady didn’t necessarily mean staid. “Me not crazy?” Kermit once exclaimed. “I hired the others!” Jim, too, often saw himself as the ringleader of a group whose members unapologetically referred to themselves as “a bunch of goddamn lunatics!”

  To Jim, The Muppet Show would always be his version of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, with the mostly patient Kermit anchoring an eclectic cast of misfits. But even those unacquainted with Kelly’s world could immediately grasp the formula Jim had put to work. “It’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” said Sesame Street’s Jon Stone. “It’s the central, neutral type figure trying to bring order out of chaos.… It was a pretty good formula.” Such a formula, then, usually included a love interest for the main character, and The Muppet Show was no exception—though as the show was originally envisioned, it wasn’t supposed to be that way.

  The rise of Miss Piggy from nameless background dancing girl to full-fledged movie star is a story straight out of Hollywood legend—except it actually happened. Piggy had made her first appearance as a nameless character on The Herb Alpert Show, then showed up as an incidental character in the Sex and Violence pilot, one of several beady-eyed pigs who appeared in the “Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs” sketch (Bonnie Erickson, who designed the first Piggy, had jokingly named her “Miss Piggy Lee” as an homage to singer Peggy Lee). For the first episodes of The Muppet Show, the puppet was slightly redesigned and given larger eyes—she would be one of the few Muppets with full-color irises—and sent to the chorus line, where she danced during the opening credits and appeared in a few sketches. She was considered such a minor character, in fact, that for much of the first season she didn’t even have a regular performer assigned to her, and was passed back and forth between Frank Oz and Richard Hunt with little concern about consistency in voice or mannerisms.

  Even as the puppet was being passed around, however, there were glimpses of the character in the making. “Sometimes a character will start from something we write, and someone will do something very funny with it,” said Juhl. “Or sometimes the guys just start ad-libbing something and it starts with them.” In Miss Piggy’s case, it was a bit of both, as Frank Oz took a simple stage direction written on the page and ad-libbed it into a memorable, almost iconic, moment. “I was working as Miss Piggy with Jim, who was doing Kermit, and the script called for her to slap him,” said Oz. “Instead of a slap, I gave him a funny karate hit. Somehow, that hit crystallized her character for me—the coyness hiding the aggression.” That karate chop, agreed Juhl, made all the difference. “The place fell apart. It was like just instantly you knew that you gotta see this again.”

  Piggy would continue to be traded between Oz and Hunt for a while longer, but gradually she became Oz’s character alone. “Miss Piggy was to have been a minor character,” noted Jim, “but Frank Oz gave her such a strong personality that she immediately became one of the principals.” That also meant that Fozzie, who was originally intended as Oz’s main character, was relegated to the supporting cast as Piggy became his primary character, in the same way that Rowlf couldn’t share as much screen time with Kermit, since Jim performed both puppets. “Rowlf could have been one of the stars of the show if only we could have had him interacting on a regular basis with Kermit and Piggy,” said Juhl. “But from a practical point of view, it just wasn’t possible.” (“Poor Rowlf,” Jane said with a sigh.)

  Oz quickly became immersed in Piggy and her personality. “She takes over,” Oz told reporters. “She has become so real to me. In fact, when I talk about her my voice changes and I move my vocal gears and become her, using her voice and even adopting her personality.” (“But let’s get it straight that I’m straight!” Oz told one London gossip columnist with just a hint of exasperation.) While watching the six-foot-two Oz perform as a female character was second nature to the Muppet performers, for some Muppet Show guests, it took some getting used to. During the first table read-through with British comedian Spike Milligan, when Oz began speaking in Piggy’s voice, Milligan stood up, pointed incredulously at Oz, and exclaimed, “It’s a man?!?”

  Writing for Piggy, said Juhl, was “real, real tough.” “The whole Muppet Show conceit is based on this concept of family,” Juhl explained. “Piggy stands aside from all of that. Piggy demands things that are quite outside of the family.… You’re walking a fine line with that character. If she isn’t a bitc
h, she isn’t funny. But you’ve got to feel the other side.” Oz, though, was confident he could play her just right, and had crafted an elaborate backstory (“She grew up on a small farm; her father died in a tractor accident, her mother wasn’t that nice to her …”) to help him better understand, and therefore better perform, the character—including her love for Kermit, setting up one of Hollywood’s great one-sided love affairs. “She’s sensuous and she’s been hurt a lot,” said Oz. “She loves the frog—my God how she covets that little green body!—but the frog doesn’t love her.”

  Richard Hunt had no patience for crafting those kinds of elaborate background stories for his characters, calling it “endless [and] fairly pointless.” Hunt didn’t immerse himself in characters; Hunt played them, taking great relish in putting on voices and performing in broad gestures, the same way children delight in putting on a neighborhood circus. That wasn’t to say that Hunt couldn’t find parts of himself in his characters. Hunt’s main character, the eager-to-please Scooter, wasn’t all that different from Hunt. “He was this little, little kid,” said Hunt of Scooter, “and that was me when I first walked in.” Scooter’s moderate pestering of Kermit and others wasn’t that far removed from Hunt, either. “I was a pain in the ass!” said Hunt, though Jim would generally allow Hunt to hover and chatter over his shoulder for a while before finally saying in mock frustration, “Richard, shut up and go away!”

  The Muppet Show’s other major character, the enigmatic Gonzo the Great, was assigned to Dave Goelz, who was still doing his best to resist Jim’s efforts to remove him permanently from the Muppet workshop to become a full-time performer. “I was so upset when Jim took him to be a puppeteer!” said Bonnie Erickson, who needed in the workshop every skilled hand she could get. “He was really so talented.” Despite Jim’s confidence in him, Goelz was still unconvinced he had what it took to be a performer. “I was very insecure, because I really had no business being in the entertainment industry,” said Goelz. “I had no training of any kind, except two little sessions with Jim and Frank, so I felt very unqualified.” But as Jim seemed to inherently understand—even if Goelz didn’t—that was just the sort of perspective necessary to create the character. “Gonzo believes he is a worthless creature,” said Goelz. “He knows and believes it, but he wants to prove he has worth.” So did Goelz.