Assignment 1-3 Journal Article Analysis

The Performance of Nonconformity on The Muppet Show - or, How Kermit Made me Queer.

This article is intended for an audience of adults that grew up in the late 70s and early 80s. The entire article is about the Muppet Show and unless you’ve seen the re-runs on DVD then you’ve probably never experienced the fun of the Muppet Theatre.

The title of this article is misleading. Kermit did not make anyone gay but instead taught children that it was okay to be whoever they were. The Muppets didn’t see male/female, black/white, young/old, they were just Muppets they all worked as a team to put on a show for the audience.

Some of the key points of the article are:

• 
  Between 1976 and 1981, Jim Henson Productions created The Muppet Show.
  The Muppet Show presented itself as pure entertainment and made no claims of "usefulness" as all.
  
• The Muppet Show conveys a particular worldview that is arguable as progressive today as it was in the late 1970s.
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  The Muppets zany performances present challenges, simultaneously gleeful and significant to normative notions of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
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  The Muppet Show re-envisions and reconstructs a century’s worth of entertainment through the fractures lens of parody, the result is a show in which the silly and lowbrow almost always win out over the serious and respectable.
• 
  The kooky fun, the comradely, and the perseverance of show fold are celebrated each week, making heroes out of the weirdoes, misfits, and losers that find a home in the Muppet Theatre.
  Most Muppets defy the categorizations of race and ethnicity. Physically, they come in a variety of unrealistic sizes and shapes, with blue, green, and purple skin.
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  The one Muppet that often breaks with gender conventions and engages in same-sex pairing is Gonzo.
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  The Muppet Theatre is a place where gender roles are provisionally destabilized, allowing for "queer play" of varying degrees of silliness and seriousness.
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  The Muppet Show still has the ability to entertain and to convey the joys of nonconformity.
  
  The key idea that I took away from this article is that the Muppet Show taught a generation of children to accept people’s differences. Anyone can become a hero even if they are considered "odd" or "strange".
  
  
  Works Cited:
  
  1. Schildcrout, Jordan (2008).The Performance of Nonconformity on The Muppet Show - or, How Kermit Made me Queer. The Journal of Popular Culture. 41, 823-835.