397 - Laughter
If I wanted to I could list every single cliche and story about laughter here. Like the one about laughter being the best medicine (although I'm sure the "patients" that have gone through Veterinarian's Hospital will disagree with me on that one). Or how, according to J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan, fairies are born out of a baby's first laugh. I could probably go on all day.
Laughter, you could say, is the stock and trade of the Muppets. A great deal of the sketches on our show are comedic; even Veterinarian's Hospital, which was supposed to be a soap opera-type skit until Rowlf started in with the bad jokes and puns and couldn't stop, and he and Piggy and Janice just ran with it. Jim loved it and the sketch stayed that way. If a sketch ended up going bad or off the wheels or something, we had three ways to get out of it that would always guarantee a laugh: blowing something up, having one of the monsters eat somebody or throwing penguins in the air.
We're not fooling ourselves; we know we're not cultured, professional entertainers by any means (no matter how much Sam Eagle wishes it were otherwise). But if we can make people smile, make them laugh, then that's good enough for us.
Laughter, you could say, is the stock and trade of the Muppets. A great deal of the sketches on our show are comedic; even Veterinarian's Hospital, which was supposed to be a soap opera-type skit until Rowlf started in with the bad jokes and puns and couldn't stop, and he and Piggy and Janice just ran with it. Jim loved it and the sketch stayed that way. If a sketch ended up going bad or off the wheels or something, we had three ways to get out of it that would always guarantee a laugh: blowing something up, having one of the monsters eat somebody or throwing penguins in the air.
We're not fooling ourselves; we know we're not cultured, professional entertainers by any means (no matter how much Sam Eagle wishes it were otherwise). But if we can make people smile, make them laugh, then that's good enough for us.