Whatsa matter with young people these daze? I was in an almost-empty bakery buying tons of sugar and this perfectly charming yet clearly lonely young guy was waiting on me. He had two large thingamadoobers in his ears to make the lobes bigger and a Kermit tattoo. So I'm like "nice tattoo". I should back track and explain here that the muppets are part of my family heritage, not because we loved Sesame Street - it actually got popular a couple of years after my time - but because we loved the muppets. We imitated the muppets. We did their voices, we compared them to people we knew, and we continue to do so. We saw The Muppet Movie (the first) together. Not because some of us had kids by then, but because we all really wanted to see it.So the young dude in the bakery tells me he is going to get Miss Piggy on his other arm. I say "cool," reserving the knowledge that she is not an original, really, and that it's absurd to get Miss Piggy there, because she does not have the kind of solid back story that some of the others do. I mention that Grover has been overlooked in the popular media, and that's a shame. And he has the nerve to say that he was never really into Grover (that part I can handle), and that Grover always seemed to be a Cookie Monster rip-off! How absurd! No offense to Cookie, but he's a one-line, albeit a very good line, Muppet. Candace Bergen does a great "C is for Cookie," but there is no accompanying book, there is no extra comedy. For a while there was Alistair Cookie, and that was truly hilarious, but they took that away to make room for that horrid little shrieker, Elmo, who is himself a ripoff of Grover, the overlooked genius of comedy.
Grover is clearly in the spirit of the great comedians. First, he was the star of The Monster at The End of This Book in which he implored the reader not to open the book, for fear one would get to the end, where there was most definitely a monster. Of course one had no choice but to read further. It was a brilliant ploy and actual real children - not the artifici
al Sesame Street ones - found it hilarious to go against Grover's wishes. He also got fired from every job he ever had on the show. He was a lousy waiter, a lousy chef, a lousy chauffeur, and all the while he would assure the customer, "Sir," or "Madam," that everything would be "just fine," and escape before the flabbergasted customer could finish frustrated protestations. Pure genius. In the end, a pseudo-shocked Grover was sort of miffed, but never upset, when the enraged customer freaked out. His assistant chickens and other poultry simply added to the absurdity. He had other adventures as well, proving himself to be a flexible actor and puppet. Grover was no Cookie Monster rip-off! He was more of an Art Carney in a blue furry suit.
