Memoirs of a Muppets Writer: (You mean somebody actually writes that stuff?) (14 page)

To show you how popular
The Muppet Show
was in England, the electrical union put out a news release stating that they would not cut the power anywhere while The Muppet Show was being broadcast. They genuinely feared the public’s reaction. The show ran on Tuesday nights in England. And when the credits started to roll, I would look out my windows and watch 60 or 70 blocks of London instantly go black.

To make matters more interesting, at the same time the electrical union was haphazardly cutting the power around the country, and people were lighting candles against the dark, the national Fire Department also went on strike. So, the National Guard took over.

Since virtually all of England belonged to one union or another, no one would cross a picket line to get to the fire engines. The only fire fighting equipment available to the Guard, without upsetting the unions, was a fleet of military trucks that had been built in the 1950s to respond to a nuclear attack. They had been mothballed ever since. They were dubbed, “Green Monsters,” and evidently were very difficult to handle since they regularly rolled over on their way to fires, causing more mayhem. The Brits took it all in stride. Nothing seems to cheer up the English like adversity.

Looking back, despite, or maybe because of all the madness, I enjoyed my time in London. No doubt about it, the English are a great people. But Londoners are as crazy as New Yorkers. They just have better diction.

Chapter 23

Moon over the A12

T
he Muppet Show
was taped at Lord Lew Grade’s A.T.V. Studios in the town of Boreham Wood, about a 45 minute drive north of London. We got there each day by car service, not the Daimler limos we rode up from South Hampton in, just regular English sedans. The cars would pick several of us up in front of our residences. Routes had been worked out since the Muppet crew was spread out all over London. My car picked up Jerry Juhl, the Head Writer, first, then me, and then puppeteer Jerry Nelson.

The car service came about through rather strange circumstances. When the show first went into production the year before, one minibus was used to pick up the entire Muppet cast and crew. That meant that the people who lived in south London, around Battersea, had to get on the bus at about 8:00 a.m., and spend close to two hours on the bus as it meandered through the city picking up the others on its way north. And, they faced the same two-hour commute to get home at night.

One day, as the bus approached Elstree, Richard Hunt, spotted Lew Grade’s Rolls Royce limousine up ahead in the heavy traffic on Highway A12. Richard asked the driver to maneuver into the lane next to the Rolls, and pass it.

The bus passed the limousine with a blare of its horns and a hearty, “Hey, Lew!!!”, shouted in unison by the passengers. The view from the back seat of the Rolls must have been fantastic, because every window on the left side of the bus flew open and a bare bottom instantly appeared in every one of them. Lew Grade was being magnificently mooned at 9:30 in the morning on the A12.

When the bus arrived at the studio, word came down that Lew Grade wanted to talk to Richard Hunt. There was no question that the irrepressible Richard was the instigator of the revolution.

“That’s great!”, Richard responded. “It just so happens I want to talk to Lew.”

Evidently, now that Richard had Lew Grade’s attention, he complained about the minibus and Sir Lew ordered the car service. You can’t ever say that Lord Lew Grade wasn’t a good sport. In fact, it was well known that the Dr. Bunsen Honeydew puppet of
Muppet
Labs is a caricature of Lew Grade.

Chapter 24

Jerry Juhl

I
can’t write much further about
The Muppet Show
without mentioning Jerry Juhl, the show’s head writer and my immediate boss. Jerry started as a puppeteer with Jim in the very early days of the Muppets in Washington, D.C. But, due to what Jerry described as “terminal stage fright”, he soon segued into being Jim’s writing alter ego, functioning basically as Jim’s second creative brain. Jerry wrote the early Muppet television specials, Muppet material for guest spots on other shows,
Sesame Street
Muppet pieces, and several of the Muppet films.

Jerry remembered the early days of the Muppets, when he had trouble finding a cheap apartment in Washington, D.C. because Jim insisted Jerry go house hunting in Jim’s second-hand Rolls Royce.

He also remembered how Jim, in the early, pre-security 60s, rarely bothered with airline reservations. Instead, he would go to the airport, find a flight he liked, and then offer a service man on that flight the price of the ticket and
$50.00
to give Jim his seat and take the next flight.

One of Jerry’s favorite Muppet
Show
stories was his experience writing for N.A.S.A. The space agency has a tradition of waking up astronauts in space every morning with a radio transmission of special music, e.g., Up, Up and
Away!,
or personal announcements about things like astronauts’ birthdays or wedding anniversaries.

Because
The Muppet Show was so
popular in 1981, N.A.S.A. asked the Muppets if they would produce a couple of special Pigs In Space radio segments to use as wake up calls during the November mission of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Of course, the Muppets agreed and Jerry was asked to write the skits.

The first thing Jerry asked for was an interview/bull session with some of the inside N.A.S.A. people who knew the Columbia crew well. The bits had to be laced with inside dope like who forgot to put the wheels down on the simulator or who sat on a peanut butter sandwich. All of this had to be in secret to protect the surprise. So, Jerry started making plans to go to Houston and have an off-campus meeting with some N.A.S.A. personnel.

“Not to worry.”, N.A.S.A. tells Jerry. A few of the other astronauts will fly up from Houston and visit Jerry in his home in Cambria on the northern California coast. And they did - each in his own F-16 fighter jet!

This actually made some sense. All of these astronauts were fighter pilots. And, as such, they had to log so many hours a month flying fighters. So, they may as well fly from Houston to Cambria.

Jerry was still impressed, until the interview was over. Jerry had just gotten a new computer. While demonstrating it to the astronauts, he opened up his new flight simulator.

Incredulously, Jerry told me, Not
one of them could land the flight simulator without crashing!

So, after an afternoon of crashing Piper Cherokees, the astronauts climbed back into their F-16s and flew back to Houston.
The Pigs In Space
pieces were a great success. But Jerry always seemed a little nervous during shuttle landings.

I can tell you from personal experience that being a head writer is a very tough job. Don Hinkley was offered the position on several shows and he always refused. He told me that no matter how much they paid you, it wasn’t worth it.

The head writer is responsible for every word in the script. And, if the rest of the writing staff dies of simultaneous heart attacks, he has to write the whole script himself. The head writer sets the tone, balance, and direction of the show. He’s the sounding board for ideas. He assigns segments to writers. It’s also his job to ask for re-writes or outright reject material, not an easy job when you’re dealing with writers’ egos. Jerry handled it all with great grace and humor.

It was Jerry who first taught me the cardinal rule of writing for the Muppets: After you finish writing a piece, read it over.
If it can be performed with human beings, it’s not Muppet material.

There was another Muppet writing rule that constantly gave me problems:
A joke that’s too bad to be used once may be bad enough to use three times.
This was most evident in the At
The Dance
and
Veterinarian’s Hospital
segments of the show. Even though these segments were very funny when produced, I didn’t feel I was earning my salary by just turning in corny old jokes. So, I’d write new ones, which wasn’t really following the structure of the show.

So, Jerry had a double quandary with me: Most of the time when I had to rewrite my material, it was to make it sharper and funnier. But, very rarely, I had to do re-writes because, as Jerry explained, my material was too funny.

Jerry had another quality which made him a great head writer—the courage to defend his staff’s material, a quality all too rare in television.

As I said, before I wrote my audition material for
The Muppet Show
, I recorded several episodes so I could analyze it. I determined that the premise of the Swedish Chef was that whatever he was cooking, the food always fought back - and won.

So I came up with the idea of the Chef making lobster thermidor. Of course, there was a Muppet lobster who refused to get into the pot. After an epic battle, the Chef finally managed to subdue the lobster and get him into the pot.

As soon as that happened, we heard, off-camera, the blare of a mariachi trumpet and the thunder of horses’ hooves. Suddenly, three Muppet lobsters, dressed as Mexican bandits with sombreros and bandoliers, burst into the Chef’s kitchen with guns blazing, rescued the lobster in the pot, and rode off.

Jerry liked the piece and put it into a script. But Jim rejected it. (Since Jim had seen the piece in my audition material, I guess he hired me in spite of it.) Normally, that would be the end of the piece. But Jerry still liked it and inserted it in the following week’s script. Again, Jim bounced it. This continued for several weeks and became a good natured inside joke between Jim and the writing staff.

Finally, Jim’s talented teenaged daughter, Cheryl, who was visiting her father in London, sat in on a script run through. Cheryl liked the piece and told Jim that she thought she could design and make some great lobster puppets for the piece. Jim relented and Cheryl built the puppets. One of them even wore the handlebar moustache I was sporting at the time.

When the piece went in front of the cameras, it played like Gangbusters! The lobster puppeteers immediately became Muppet versions of the Mexican bandits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madres, ad libbing (as I knew they would): We
don’t need no stinkin’ badges! We’re Federales. Jou know, mounted police.

Jim loved it. And, I’m proud to say that the Lobster/Swedish Chef piece is now a part of the permanent Muppet display in the Smithsonian Museum.

(Just to give you a little writer’s insight, I had an alternate version of the lobster sketch that I think would have worked equally well. In it the Chef is making lamb stew and forces a cute little fuzzy-wuzzy lamb into the pot. Then three lambs dressed as gangsters with fedora hats and Brooklyn accents burst in and execute the rescue.)

In fact, Jim liked the lobster sketch so much, he said to Jerry, “Let’s take another look at your chicken-gunfight-in-the-western-saloon bit”. The chicken-gunfight-in-the-western-saloon bit was something I dreamed up after a conversation with Jerry and Don about how many countries were broadcasting The Muppet Show. We were syndicated in 104 countries, with the local language dubbed over in most cases. So, I’d occasionally write a punch line and say to myself, “I wonder what that sounds like dubbed in German or Tibetan.”

I began to look for ideas that didn’t require dialogue. That way, the laughs would all be visual, and visual comedy transcends language. After some thought, I came up with the idea of doing cliche’ movie scenes that the whole world has seen a million times. But, I wanted to do them with animal puppets, making their particular sounds, instead of dialogue, so the scenes wouldn’t have to be dubbed. I know, that sounds strange. But, here’s how it worked:

I decided to do an old fashioned western saloon gunfight. But, all the participants would be Muppet chickens and all the dialogue would be clucking in the appropriate attitude.

The sketch opened in a Muppet western saloon set. The bar is packed with chickens. A rinky-dink piano is playing. Several chicken couples are dancing. Gonzo is behind the bar.

There’s a sting of music. The swinging doors fly open and in walks the toughest looking black rooster wearing a black hat and two six guns. He strides over to the bar to a chicken looking fetching in a mantilla. He clucks coarsely and suggestively in her ear.

She screams and slaps his face. Enter the good guy rooster with his white hat. He comes to the lady chicken’s defense. He and the gunman start to circle each other, clucking ominously.

This was some of the best puppeteering I’ve ever seen. Jerry Nelson as the Good Guy and Frank Oz as Black Bart milked every bit of melodrama they could from the scene. Pure and simple, it was just great comedic acting.

Finally, Black Bart pulls a six gun and fires. But the Good Guy holds up a frying pan and the shot ricochets off it. The bullet continues to ricochet around the barroom, breaking china and bottles on its way. Eventually, it hits the chain on the chandelier, causing the chandelier to fall on Black Bart, knocking him out. The final shot is Good Guy and Mantilla Chicken riding off into the sunset - on a cow, Jim’s contribution.

After his wonderful wife, Susan, Jerry loved travel, penguins, exotic cars (he once owned a V-8 Morgan with an oak wood frame) and puns - the more groan inspiring, the better. One of his favorites involved a tourist in Mercy, England being recommended the local specialty, koala bear tea. When he complains about the lumps in it, he is told: The
koala tea of Mercy is not strained!”

My favorite Jerry Juhl pun story also involves Jon Stone. Sometime in the 1980s, Jon and I were writing a script together. This was just about the time fax machines became standard equipment. Jon and I were both working at our New York homes, and faxing the material between us.

One afternoon, Jon and I got a little goofy and started faxing puns back and forth in a kind of, “Can you top this?”, contest. (Hey, we’re comedy writers. We’re allowed. Besides, Jon was the Executive Producer.) Jon was also a great connoisseur of the punus
terriblus.
So, in desperation, I faxed Jerry at his home in California: