What the Hell Are Muppets?

Jim Henson, an unemployed sock factory worker with delusions that would make Mark David Chapman roll his eyes, titter, and run off to the closet to masturbate feverishly into a tea cozy, did not create the Muppets. Popular assumption is the asshole on that one. Nor did he even discover them, as several Kings of England before him had conferred with the strange beings on matters of state politics and interior decorating for hundreds of years. Rather, Henson's genius lay in using felt puppet totems to channel the beings from their Muppet-realm during hour-long televised séances that he would pass off as children's entertainment. How would America's parents feel if they knew the secret behind this children's television mainstay? It's a trick question, America doesn't have parents. It's a country, stupid.

Many parents would shrivel and dry up like a baked turnip to learn that they subjected their children to this brand of pagan daycare for years, parking their drooling tots in front of the one-eyed monster for hours of seemingly free babysitting. Of course, they'd crap out their own appendix if they knew that Mr. Rogers had to do his show to fulfill the community service portion of his probation. As much should have been obvious since he spent half the damn show changing clothes in order to dodge his parole officer.

Henson wasn't an ex-con himself, but he did have more issues than National Geographic. Regardless, he will always be remembered as a great American because he found a way to work through his demons and bring us all a dog that played the piano.

The real question is who in the hell was making these Muppets move, since back then they didn't have computer animation or midgets small enough to fit in a Gonzo suit. It wasn't until Chernobyl that this was possible. The evidence suggests that even Henson himself didn't know. He was primarily into the puppets, and some have suggested that his entire knowledge of the occult came from a supernatural joke book he found in his aunt's sock drawer. No one knows which joke it was that brought the Muppets to life, but my money's on:

Q. Why didn't the ghost have fun at the ball?

A. He didn't have any body to dance with.

That one's a classic.

Regardless of which joke it was that did the trick, before he knew it Henson's puppets were all possessed by former heads of state and card sharks who had got themselves on some kind of shit list in the afterlife where they always had to be on call in case somebody dug up a dusty old book of spells and read off an incantation in a fake English accent on a lark.

There are whole clubs of weird people who get together and debate over who each of the Muppets really was, but nobody can really ever say for sure. Though I challenge anyone to provide any compelling evidence that Winston Churchill wasn't the Swedish chef. It's just too perfect. And though some have argued that he's already been reincarnated as a diaper lining in dysentery country, I'll always believe that Hitler came back as Beaker. I mean, Christ, just look at the guy. They even have the same voice. I've watched some old documentary footage of Hitler and it's uncanny, "Meep-meep-meep-meep-meep."

It's shocking news for most of you, I know. But in the big picture it hardly matters, as kids still learned to count and that aliens are agreeable. Nobody got hurt, except for the days when Dr. Teeth had his pimp shirt on or that time Sweetums went apeshit and ate some of the singing pigs. But, all in all, a small price to pay for years of free babysitting, and it was still the most wholesome thing on television after the cast of Pinwheel found out about cocaine.

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