It's not as if this is a world into which happiness is easily brought. Bringing even a little can be a major undertaking. Jim Henson brought a lot. The precise amount is immeasurable.
A visionary, a magician, a comedian and a tragedian - part Hans Christian Andersen and part Albert Einstein - Jim Henson revolutionized puppetry and helped reinvent children's television. He did it through craftsmanship and showmanship and even salesmanship, but he also did it by keeping alive within himself the child he once had been.When death took Jim Henson Wednesday at the age of 53, it took that child as well. How do we explain this outrage to the other children, and to ourselves?
Jim Henson presided over a national theater in miniature. His repertory company, global in impact, had among its principals a vain blonde pig, a cookie-craving monster, a grouch who lived in a garbage can, and a shy and ungainly yellow bird. And Bert and Ernie and Grover and Scooter.
When he fathered the immortal Kermit in 1957, Jim Henson created a Frogenstein. His world would never be the same. Neither would ours. There would be more happiness in it. There would be The Muppets.
Nearly as tall and nearly as shy as Big Bird, Jim Henson had the puttery, distracted air of a scientist, a softspoken tinkerer who loved manipulating the technology of Muppetry and the technology of television to wreak his clever effects. A Muppet was, he explained, a crossbreed of marionette and puppet, more agile and antic than either had been before.
Over the years, Muppets rushed in where puppets would have feared to tread. They rode bicycles, they swam, they flew through the air. They starred in motion pictures, a first for a bunch of actors made of felt and foam rubber.
When they branched out from "Sesame Street" and started "The Muppet Show" in the late '70s, the Muppets were able to lure big stars (make that, other big stars) to appear with them, from Linda Ronstadt to Sylvester Stallone to Milton Berle. Rudolph Nureyev appeared on the show and, with a gigantic pig, danced the "Swine Lake" ballet.
When he launched "The Muppet Show," which is still in syndication all over the planet, Henson agreed to show a reporter around his New York workshop. There was Kermit T. Frog, painlessly impaled on a stand, alarmingly limp and lifeless, his green head bowed solemnly.
Henson picked him up, slipped the frog onto his hand, raised his voice a little so that it became Kermit's, and brought that froggie to life.
And the reporter, without a blink, instantly turned in his tracks and addressed his next question to the frog, as if Henson himself had vanished. Looking around the cluttered workshop a little later, though, one could see other copies of Kermit designed to be used in various kinds of scenes.
Which one was the real one? "They're all the real one," Jim Henson said.
It should be remembered that what Henson and his associates brought to tele-puppetry wasn't just cuteness, which was already there in abundance, but also a raucous irreverence. Early Henson TV shows in Washington, where he got his start, were full of playful rowdiness, and his hilarious commercials for Wilkins Coffee usually ended with one Muppet dispatched abruptly to a cartoonish kingdom come.
Later, the Muppets made audiences roar on "The Jack Paar Show" and "The Ed Sullivan Show" by blowing each other up or, on some occasions, swallowing each other up.
They were furry, funny, stylized slapstickers. Then, when "Sesame Street" came along in 1969, they became something more. They developed soul. They had subtexts and complexes and inner selves. In Kermit's plaintive eyes, one can even sense a haunted angst. Despite the existence of the "Muppet Babies" cartoon series on CBS, Kermit really does seem to be a character with no youth behind him and no dotage ahead.
Ageless and unattached, sometimes encountered alone and contemplative in his home pond, Kermit emerged as an existential hero for our time.
"Kermit is the closest one to me," Henson said of his alter-ego in 1977. "He's the easiest to talk with. He's the only one who can't be worked by anyone else - only by me. See, Kermit is just a piece of cloth with a mouthpiece in it. The character is literally my right hand."
That he remained mostly behind the scenes didn't seem to bother Jim Henson any more than it had bothered Burr Tillstrom of "Kukla, Fran and Ollie." Occasionally he showed his face, however, as in one of those American Express "do-you-know-me?" commercials. "Nobody knows my face," he said.
Whereas Kermit and Miss Piggy had worldwide recognition.
Unlike most of us, Jim Henson never had to stop playing with his toys. He did the playing; we had the fun. We didn't just envy our children, we joined them. The happiness Jim Henson brought into the world remains behind forever.