The Muppets: A Show Not Bad Enough

Last updated on: September 24, 2015 at 9:33 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Muppets: A Show Not Bad Enough 2015-09-24T21:33:02-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Your father got to laugh during his Muppet Show.

Watching the première of The Muppets would have been boring if it had not become a fascinating journey into how unfunny a comedy program could be. I would start to laugh at a sketch on Dancing with the Tsars when the writers would decide that a crabby putdown in the mouth of Kermit would be funnier than continuing the joke. There are half-formed jokes in the show, but they are aborted by the kind of television making that still thinks the kids love “quick cut away” or that the mockumentary is new. This show is so stale in format, pacing, and ideas that the older show looks cutting edge by comparison.

As for the “adult” content, beware. The person saying that this show is more “adult” than the original Muppets thinks “adult” means obsessed with sex, tired, and cynical: in other words, growing up to live in junior high school. The Muppets themselves say “naughty” things like the kid I knew in camp who came from a super-Christian family. He would use a crudity, but a half beat too late. “What the. . . expletive deleted. . . ” he would say. He had learned to swear from 70’s comics where “What the . . . ” was never finished. Safe to say, if you think that condoning vice is funny if only a Muppet says it, then you will love this show. If you have been dying for television to be even less innocent, then this is your show.

This is not my grandmother’s Muppets (they warned me) and they are right since my grandmothers were both warm, bright, adult, and funny.

One can excuse much for a laugh except that the Muppets are not funny . . . this is a witless twenty-two minutes that feels like an hour full of “stars” that the Network wanted to promote with the Apple computer prominently displayed. The writers had a concept: don’t just remake the old show. This they succeeded in doing, but they did so by removing all the good of the old show with the dated bits. Characters have l0st any depth or subtlety: Bunsen used to harm Beaker “accidentally,” because of his myopic dedication to “science.” Truth in jest. Now he just tortures him. Even Fozzie gets to be offended when he is stereotyped with “bear” behavior . . . despite being a bear.

Did I mention that this wasn’t funny?

The Muppets are relentlessly unfunny. Humor has been banished with the innocence. Perhaps innocence comes in for the worst treatment: it is clubbed to death with sophomoric zest. Long time readers such as my mother will know I am a critic of “Christian” movies: zeal turning a story into propaganda. The Muppets is the same sort of show writing: an agenda, a point, with a story on top. The writers began with the agenda: update the Mupppets and they wrote the agenda. To update the Muppets, something the wonderful film The Muppets did without trashing all the innocence, meant making them “hip” if the 1990’s were still cutting edge culturally.

Someone should have pointed out that vaudeville was dead in the 1970’s, but that the original show revived the genre by taking the timeless elements of vaudeville and combining it with fresh writing. Some lackwit at ABC caught the fact that vaudeville was dead, but forgot that it was dead long before the first show. They ditched vaudeville for talk show television with stale writing and so managed to produce a show less fresh, original, and up to date than a 1970’s show that revived a 1920’s genre.

I am waiting for Miss Piggy to endorse a Clinton or make a crudity about one. At least I would be waiting if I anticipated wasting twenty-two minutes better spent watching random cat videos if the goal is a laugh.

The puppets themselves are wasted. These are puppets and being puppets allows them to do things humans cannot and should not do. If one wants funny puppets rated R, then one can watch Team America, but you probably should not. There puppets do what adult actors should not do, because they are puppets. The Muppets pretends the puppets are people and then gives them the same plots that we have seen on “comedy” shows of the last decade. This turns out to be as funny as the last season of the American version of The Office.

Birdemic is a movie so bad that it is good again. The Muppets is just bad enough to be simply bad.

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