Dear Internet,
Season
four has begun for me, and what can I say?
I have said for the last three or four posts that I have nothing much to
say, but I still seem to find something to prattle on about. Yesterday, I mad e an attempt to display my
feelings over the matter that "The Muppet Show" is not meant to be
seen end to end, but I think all I did was showcase the faults of the
experiment I am conducting rather than the actual faults of the show. Do not get me wrong. I do not wish to retract my criticism that
the show can get stale when put end to end.
Watching "The Muppet Show" for a whole day is like spending
the whole day at a bakery eating food that the bakery makes only once a day at
daybreak. The first loaf is pretty darn
good. It is fresh out of the oven, is
still quite warm, and tastes like dry clouds that have basked in the warm glow
of the sun. The second one is a bit hard now that the crust is getting a bit thick
from cooling, but the inside is still hot like freshly dried bed sheets. By the time you have gotten to your sixth
serving of bread, you are too busy trying all the varieties of jam and jelly to
slather on to make it appetizing. At the
end of the day, all that is left is rock hard loaves that everyone else has
passed over, and it is only good for French toast at that point except there
are no eggs to make it with. If you had
only eaten one kind of bread each day and spread out your expose to it, you
might not have ended up with distaste for baked goods at the end of the first
day.
I think
I have gotten carried away with my analogy for "The Muppet Show." Worse yet, all I am doing is repeating my
topic of yesterday. So, what can I
mention about the show that I have not harped on before? How about the self-deprecating humor? This show has got as one of its main pillars
of comedy a continual joke that the show is a horrible abomination of a
production. There are two characters
dedicated specifically to this: Statler and Waldorf. They make jokes about how the show is unfit
for viewing and should be deemed a health hazard to those that watch it. They are a couple of hecklers made specifically
to point out the old and bad jokes that the show makes and then make their own
jokes against the show. Even the other
characters that perform on the stage point out how the show is bad. Everything from the acting quality of Miss
Piggy to the questionable entertainment of Gonzo the Great's performances to
Fozzie the Bear's jokes falls under comedic ridicule. The fact that the most common plot for the
show includes something going horribly wrong to the point that the show becomes
a fiasco in the end proves that there is at least some truth to the matter. The counter argument is that the fiasco is
all a well written and well choreographed plot made by the writers. It takes real talent to be bad at something. A bad actor just acts poorly, but a great
actor can act like a bad actor and, more importantly, is entertaining while
doing it.
This self-deprecating
humor is something that changes the way an audience watched the show. Most comedy shows want the audience to laugh
along. That is the purpose of the joke,
laugh tracks, and various other things like lighting and situations that create
a tone for the show. What "The
Muppet Show" does is make the audience laugh at the show instead of with
it. But even that is laughing along with
the show because the show is laughing at itself. Brain Henson has told about how his father,
Jim Henson, admitted that the Seven-foot-tall Talking Carrot, which was only there
because of a pun between carrot and parrot, was a bad joke, but it was a good
joke for the Muppets. There are plenty
of "bad jokes" throughout the show.
In my opinion, the only such thing as a bad joke is one that is not
funny, but that is for a later discussion.
"The Muppet Show" relies on the chance that even if they fail
to make a successful joke, they can pass it off as an intestinally unfunny joke
and make the unfunniness of the failed joke as being funny. This is not even a chance considering that
the show leaves an opening for such a situation a mile wide. At this point, there is some sort of meta-joke
coming into play where things that are unfunny become funny by the fact that
they are not funny. I am not sure if
"The Muppet Show" has got me completely fooled or that I was already
a fool to begin with, which is plenty possible with all things considered.
Three
more days of this, Internet. Three more
days.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
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