It's not easy being blue

(With that title, this week, I bet you think this is a post about the election. It isn't.)

Muppet creator Jim Henson was a guest on the Arsenio Hall show, which situates this story shortly before he died in 1990. He came on stage and sat on the couch, chatted with Arsenio for a little bit, then brought out Kermit.

This was accomplished without patter or camera cutaway. He simply produced the puppet (from behind the couch, as I remember it), put it on, and the interview went on from there. There was no proscenium arch for Kermit to sit in, no ledge to hide Henson. To sum up: We're talking about a man, on a couch, with one hand up a frog's ass and the other hand manipulating the rods that move the frog's arms, talking to another guy on another couch, in front of a studio audience.

And of course, Henson was a puppeteer, not a ventriloquist: you could see him talking when Kermit did. And yet because Henson was a very good puppeteer, everyone--including Arsenio--watched Kermit instead of Henson.

Everyone, in short, believed.

Arsenio tried several times to turn the conversation with Kermit a little blue, trying to get Kermit to say bawdy stuff about Miss Piggy, tossing in double entendres, using "pork" as a verb, and so on. Kermit absolutely refused to take the bait. No Boy Scout was ever more clean and wholesome.

Soon--again, with no cutaway or attempt to hide what was going on--Henson took off the Kermit puppet and put on Rowlf the dog. (I just checked Wikipedia, which reports that this was Rowlf's last public appearance before Henson's death.) It looked for a moment like Henson was wrestling with a shaggy brown lap blanket. Then, without further set-up, Rowlf raised his head, did a double-take as he spotted Arsenio on the other couch, and greeted him with delight, in his trademark gravelly voice: "Arsenio Hall! Ya son of a bitch!"

Arsenio--like the audience--was clearly not ready for this change-up, and he nearly slid off the couch in shocked laughter.

Rowlf (not Henson, mind you--Rowlf), didn't miss a beat, turning to the audience in evident puzzlement: "What?" he shrugged, "I'm allowed to say it--I'm a dog!"

Great line, great improvisation, and all with the puppeteer and voice talent sitting there in plain view. Amazing.

All of which came to mind when I read this:

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.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that calling it "uncensored" is probably an over-sell; I'll bet the material doesn't go any farther than any syndicated re-run of "Friends," which means it will shoot past the heads of the "Sesame Street" demographic but will fall comfortably short of, say, "Richard Prior Live on the Sunset Strip."

Although I confess I've always wondered about Rowlf. Given his "hey, don't shoot me" demeanor, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to learn that he got his piano-playing start in a bordello. (Even on "Uncensored," they'd probably never call it a whorehouse.)

Still, I'll be rooting for them.