Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (20 page)

MAKE A JERK LAUGH
WHY PUPPETS CAN SAY WHAT WE CAN’T

If children are innocent and wise, then what does that make
adults? The cult of business is made up of adults whose primary mode of
interaction with others is capitalism—buying and selling rather than giving and
receiving gifts. We often call adults “hardened,” but Henson’s parodies of the
business world seemed to get them to soften up a bit.

Though Henson stopped making commercials in
1969, he struck upon another side business that was somewhat similar: “Muppet
Meeting Films.” Because Henson had been so successful with his own presentation
films for the Wilson’s Meats’s sales team and promotional films like “Paperwork
Explosion” for IBM, it gave David Lazer, IBM’s audiovisual program manager, an
idea for a new venue for the Muppets: boring meetings. When Lazer left IBM to
become a producer for
The Muppet Show
in 1975, he also organized a set
of short films that companies could buy or rent in order to add liveliness to
the normal workday. Karen Falk wrote that the Meeting Films were designed to
counteract “the stupor of technical language and diagrams.”
^[44]

These films were sold to businesses, yet they
poked fun at businesses. In an “inspirational” film for the 100% Club, Rowlf
reads IBM’s “golden words in the sales manual … thou shalt conduct IBM’s
business in a responsible and ethical manner.” He then loses all his sales by
being too ethical. The scenario is ridiculous, but it discloses a fundamental
paradox of business ethics. How do you run a business with honor, ethics, and
integrity when you’re competing to out-sell, under-sell, and ideally obliterate
the competition? It’s a dicey thing to say in an IBM meeting. Yet, in the Muppet
Meeting Films this kind of conflict turns into absurdist humor.

It goes back to Bell’s definition of puppetry as
“performance of the material world.”
^[45]
Puppetry is an art that shows the world to itself, shows it how it moves, and
makes that movement (which is terrifying, dangerous, and larger than any of us)
small, nonthreatening, and funny. In revolutions, puppet effigies of leaders
are burned, and in therapy sessions, puppets are used to speak true feelings.
Henson said in an interview that puppetry is “a part of theater in which small
wooden figures serve to represent things. With puppets you can deal with
subjects in a way that isn’t possible with people.”
^[46]

There is an interesting effect when people
perform with the Muppets or any puppet—we can’t help but react positively
towards them. The incredibly serious Morley Safer of
60 Minutes
cracked
up hysterically when he got pulled into talking—really
interacting
,
instinctually—with a stuffed pig. We see it with the child in Central Park who
knows Henson is there but ignores him. We also see it when tough-guy actor
Arthur Godfrey performs as Santa with a group of Muppet monsters on
The Ed
Sullivan Show
. One can imagine that Godfrey must have refused to wear an
itchy beard, because he makes for an odd, beardless Santa. And when the monsters
surround him and sway, he looks slightly uncomfortable with all the grown men
puppeteers so close to him. Yet, when a proto-Grover character leans in to make
eye contact, Godfrey instinctually nuzzles Grover’s nose.

There is something about the diminutive size of
a puppet that gives us fond feelings—the kind we would have for a child or a
pet. For children, this quite closely resembles their feelings towards a doll
or stuffed animal. There is something about a small being that is harmless and almost
irresistibly lovable.

This is exactly the way that Muppet Meeting
Films seemed to make adults laugh by insulting them. Falk describes the song
“Money,” which Rowlf performed for both television and corporate audiences:

A send-up of the money-hungry, it was a great song
for Jim as he enjoyed parodying the business world and the quest for the
almighty dollar.
^[47]

In it, Henson sings Stan Freberg’s ode to “mazuma, el
dinero, wanna be a millionaire-o.” Falk notes: “Rowlf … would become expert
at poking fun of corporate America.”
^[48]
These puppet performances showed the salesman to himself in puppet form.
Puppets can do what people can’t; they can show a jerk how he’s funny, how he’s
human. It is an example of inviting the outside in.

Boring business meetings were the perfect place
to invite the outside into Henson’s way of thinking. We might picture two
framings of the Muppet Meeting Film. First, imagine a room full of men in
suits, with bottled water and laptops. You are Jim Henson and you walk into
this room, contracted to perform a puppet show to entertain them. You are on
their turf. How do you feel? When we enter someone else’s turf, and we are
outnumbered, we tend to feel defensive. It’s a tough crowd.

Now, let us back up and reimagine this
interaction in a new way. Picture instead a room full of men in suits. You are
one of them, sitting at the table. You have a strong urge to check Facebook,
but you know everyone will judge you if you do. The guy next to you won’t stop
doing that annoying thing he always does, tapping his foot and clearing his
throat. Your boss announces a short film. On a screen, a Muppet cracks jokes
about the seriousness of your job. You find yourself laughing out loud. How do
you feel? Maybe like you don’t want it to end. Maybe like you’d rather go into
the world of that screen than stay in that boring meeting.

We can walk into the world of business feeling
we are on the turf of strangers, possible enemies. Or we can enter that world
in a way that brings our own turf with us, so that we no longer feel defensive
but expansive. With the realization of the power our art wields, we can become
generous. When we do, we become compelling, enviable,
impressive
, and we
have the ability to change things.

Henson truly felt this largeness of spirit.
Puppeteer Dave Goelz said:

There’s a philosophy I think Jim started out with—that
people are basically good, life is to be enjoyed, take care of other people, there’s
enough for everybody.

This feeling that “there’s enough,” is actually not as
common as you’d think in a country with such wealth and opportunity. In
The
Gift
, Hyde writes, “Scarcity and abundance have as much to do with the form
of exchange as with how much material wealth is at hand. Scarcity appears when
wealth cannot flow.”
^[49]
That is to say that, with any given amount of wealth, one can either feel
abundance or scarcity, and it has less to do with amount than it does with
whether we trust that wealth will come and go when we need it. Modern capitalist
societies, Hyde explains, tend to operate on the principle of scarcity. The
idea is that we should hoard whatever we have because we might not get more.
Hunter-gatherer tribes, on the other hand, eat the entirety of what they catch,
stockpiling none, and trust that three days later, they can go out and catch
another boar. For one who trusts in nature, there is an abundance of natural
wealth.

What does it mean to feel that “there’s enough
for everybody” as Henson did? Well, as we have seen, it meant Henson giving Steven
Spielberg a tour of his Creature Shop when he was developing
E.T
., even
though he was technically Henson’s competition. Kenworthy said:

I was a bit panicked, because we were all concerned
about people seeing our techniques. Jim was much less worried. He thought that
everyone should share these new developments.”
^[50]

Henson invited Spielberg—the outside—in. The laws of a
market economy would tell you to protect your secrets from the
competition—especially given the fact that Spielberg’s
E.T.
would in
fact go on to win most of 1982’s box office dollars while
The Dark Crystal
foundered. Yet Henson didn’t see movie tickets as a scarcity, but rather an
abundance, infinitely renewable. And today both films are enduring classics.

Henson similarly felt unthreatened by George
Lucas, another possible competitor. Henson chose to collaborate instead. Industrial
Light and Magic produced glass paintings for
The Dark Crystal
, and then
Henson let Frank Oz create Yoda for
Star Wars
. Because Henson felt
magnanimous toward other fantasy filmmakers, he gained allies in Hollywood.
George Lucas, for example, went on to produce Henson’s
Labyrinth
.

With Meeting Films, Henson came onto business’s turf
and yet felt that
he
was the one who was at home. When the Muppet Skip
says, “Hi there, all you lovers of hot dogs and money,” to Wilson’s Meats
executives, and the shock of a puppet’s insulting you makes you laugh, it is
effectively like saying, “Come on in, sit down, take your shoes off. Stay a
while.”

The insults Henson’s puppets wielded were so
effective in changing people’s minds because they weren’t meant to hurt. They
were meant as a gift.

PARODY AS GIFT
GIVE GREED A MIRROR

For Henson, parody was the gift that could bring disparate
groups together. It allowed him to enter the business world as an artist, and
to have members of the business class engage with his art. If you saw yourself
or someone you know puppetted on
The Muppet Show
, you received a gift.
Someone had taken the time to study your features and how they move. It is like
being shown a mirror, but one that took exorbitant effort to make—in effect, a portrait
that wasn’t commissioned. By seeing people as basically good, Henson’s caricature
started to resemble something more like flattery. It seemed to encourage its
recipient to go out and do the same for someone else—to pay close attention to
their uniqueness.

If Henson’s parody was a gift in the Hydian
sense, then it contributes to the feeling of abundance that characterizes a
gift economy. Conversely, if Henson refused to give any gifts to the business
world, it would further the feeling of scarcity. In the
Fraggle Rock
episode “The Perfect Blue Rollie,” Wembley gives Boober a shiny pebble that’s a
real honey, but being a worrier, Boober decides to hoard it in a museum he’s
made. Not allowing the gift to move isolates him and nearly kills him in a rock
slide. He’s saved by his friends and then decides to give the pebble to them.
Boober finally learns what Wembley said in the beginning: giving makes you feel
really good.

It was telling that Henson’s plots never ended
in revenge fantasies like the vultures in
Snow White
eating the evil queen.
In Henson’s worldview, the villains are always given a gift in the attempt to
invite them into the Muppets’ way of thinking. For instance, Larry Mirkin said
of
Fraggle Rock
, “Most of us—certainly Jerry and I and I think Jim and
Jocelyn—we really didn’t believe in the idea of good and evil as I think
sometimes it’s handled in different shows, and the conflicts in the show are
usually because of people’s misunderstanding—conflicts of interest rather than
one character is good and one character is bad. We just didn’t think that way
about the show.”
^[51]

That is, the dragon is never meant to be slain.
He is meant to be transformed, and he is transformed when he is given a gift
and he chooses not to hoard it. The gift melts the dragon’s heart—or more
accurately, melts the distinction between outside and inside—and it effectively
invites the dragon, the fearful hoarder, into the gift economy. It shows him
the benefits of the gift and shows him that, in order to enjoy them, he can’t
sell them for profit. He has to keep the giving cycle alive. And give back.

In
The Great Santa Claus Switch
, Santa turns
the oversized henchmen Thig and Thog over to the good side by giving a gift. Confused,
they ask, “Why are you always giving stuff to people?” Santa tells them,
“because giving makes a person feel very very good.” On
The Ed Sullivan Show
,
a bunch of monsters think Santa’s toys are “worth quite a lot,” and plan on
“selling them at a fantastic profit.”
^[52]
They sing, “Come Christmas tomorrow, we’ll make a fast buck.”
^[53]
Arthur Godfrey as Santa tells them, “You can’t steal it because I’m
giving
it to you.” Godfrey tells them, “There are plenty of toys to go around,”
^[54]
because when gifts are allowed to move and not hoarded, no matter how many
gifts there are, it will be an economy of abundance. Everyone will get a chance
to experience them. In echoes of Seuss’s Grinch, the monsters who are outside
the gift circle aren’t meant to be beaten or killed, but rather, brought into
the inside group of the Christmas gift exchange.

The Muppet universe is one of inclusion, with
striking echoes of Hyde’s book. In fact, “The Perfect Blue Rollie” episode of
Fraggle
Rock
was written by David Young after reading
The Gift
, which had
been given to him by Margaret Atwood. The song from the episode “Pass It On”
was later used in
A Muppet Family Christmas
, when the Fraggles give a
ceremonial Fraggle pebble to
The Muppet Show
’s Robin, who then gives it
to
Sesame Street
’s Grover. Gobo Fraggle said, “That pebble’s been given
thirty-seven times.” Similarly, in the early eighties, Atwood gave out copies
of
The Gift
to every artist she knew.

In order to turn a stranger into a friend, a
gift is given. Nearly all children’s stories tell us this; however, it is
deceptive how many adult conflicts stem from the outside-inside paradox, and
how many could actually be resolved through the giving of a gift.

The kind of parody that Henson gave hardened
adults was to see themselves clearly for their faults and offer them an
invitation to be innocent once again. It is the gift Kermit gives to Doc Hopper
in the showdown scene of
The
Muppet Movie
. A Disney hero might duel
with Hopper to the death. Instead, Kermit reaches out to him: