A pig, a frog and a, what the hell is that thing?
Tom Momary
"My ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference
… to leave the world a little bit better for my having been
here."
 Jim Henson
All of us have memories from our childhood, some perhaps happier
than others, which bear the imprints of many people in our lives.
But even the most stoic among us, I believe, must admit to being
touched at least a little by the ideas and the work of one
particular man. Most of us, of course, never even knew Jim Henson
personally. But that didn’t stop him from affecting us. And who
among us can even really remember a time before the Muppets?
I asked a few people about the Muppet characters and which were
their favorites. The first thing I noticed was how their eyes lit
up as they thought about it.
Something from their childhood burned through that adult shell
they hide behind. And how many votes were for Rolf the dog/piano
player? How many for Beaker, the quintessential lab assistant to
Dr. Bunsen Honeydew? How many for Gonzo and Miss Piggy and Animal?
It doesn’t really matter. I’ll bet you’re smiling right now just at
the mention of some of these names. THAT is what is important. It’s
amazing how someone whom we have never met, nor will ever know, can
touch our lives. And he did.
The second thing I noticed was how everyone talked about the
Muppets in present tense. As if they still thought about them
fondly. As if they were happy memories from childhood that still
floated by once in a while. As if every so often, very infrequently
of course, when the roommates weren’t around, they maybe turned on
The Muppet Show just for a minute or two. These shaggy, hairy,
funny-looking but elegantly simple characters called the Muppets
revolutionized puppetry and touched many of our childhoods with
happiness.
And probably most of our fertile, brilliant minds were weaned on
stuff like "C is for cookie" (please, no comments on how that might
explain a great many things in our world …). Above all, Jim
Henson recognized that puppets somehow have a unique passageway
into children’s minds.
I read a story about autistic children, who are totally
noncommunicative with parents, siblings and therapists, who would
suddenly open up to the Muppets as they watched them on TV. These
children would converse with Ernie and Bert, to the point where
doctors began using puppets in the therapy of autistic children.
Somehow, the Muppets are friends to these kids.
And when children visit the set of Sesame Street, they only see
the characters. "The puppeteer ceases to exist," Sesame Street head
writer John Stoner was quoted as saying in "Jim Henson  The
Work." "The child comes right up to talk to Grover or the Count.
They don’t look at the puppeteer … there’s something that happens
with puppets which doesn’t happen in any other medium. There’s a
magic there that Jim (Henson) understood."
And not just with children, either. If you go back and look at
the Muppets now, as an adult, you will see that, while the Muppet
characters communicate on the same level as the children, they also
communicate on an adult level  their humor is
multi-layered.
For example, not many 4-year-olds routinely listen to Placido
Domingo, I expect, and so the humor in the name of the character
Placido Flamingo probably escapes them. That subtle pun is for
older people. Jim Henson worked to communicate with children on
their level and also to speak to adults. One of the best
demonstrations of this he achieved can be glimpsed on The Muppet
Show. When guest stars like Harry Belafonte, Bob Hope and Jean
Stapleton performed with the Muppets, it wasn’t silly. It still
isn’t. Somehow, it works.
Through their movies and various shows, the Muppets invest
childhood with a kind of dignity all its own. They make children
feel comfortable in a very uncomfortable, adult world. And for us
adults, the Muppets remind us of childhood, and that it is still
there within us, that deep down, we will always be children.
And that isn’t such a bad thing. Because children see the world
in primary colors. They don’t worry about reality, and they don’t
know the word "impossible." I think a lot of us adults spend quite
a lot of time  the better times in our lives  trying to
return to that perspective, the one perspective that gets things
done in this world  the "can-do" attitude so often attributed
to the likes of John Kennedy. We can learn a lot from
simplicity.
If humor is important in our lives, if laughs and happy memories
from childhood are what sustain us in bleaker times, if the simple
ideas and humor of fanciful furrier-than-life characters give us
some small escape from a complicated existence, then it is clear we
owe something to Jim Henson. We ought to pay a little gratitude to
someone who made us smile once-upon-a-time and who, perhaps, still
does.
One measure of a man is the degree to which he affects the world
for the better and the depth of affection he leaves behind.
When Jim Henson died in 1990, letters poured in from children
all over, many decorated with characters that Jim had given to the
world. And millions of adults, still very much children at heart,
also said goodbye. Even in a life that was cut short, I think Jim
Henson fulfilled his dream of leaving the world "a little bit
better for my having been here."
Thanks, Jim.
Momary is a third-year graduate student of geophysics.