Life With a Hand Up Your Butt
TRIGGER WARNING: This post contains images of Muppets
Audio by Sound Legacy
I’ll start with a confession: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about puppets. Perhaps an unhealthy amount.
Some of my earliest memories are of watching Shari Lewis and her hand puppet Lamb Chop on TV. Shari may have been my first celebrity crush, with Lamb Chop as a close second. I also loved the ventriloquists on variety shows in those days, and I spent hours talking in a funny voice trying not to move my lips, erroneously assuming that someone, someday, would be impressed by this skill.
Decades later, I used a couple of homemade dog puppets in my one-man comedy show, and I’ve published dozens of comics about various kinds of puppets throughout my career as a cartoonist.
Am I a Puppet Fetishist?
Maybe.
We may think puppets are nothing more than children’s toys, but I’m fascinated by the power they wield over us psychologically. Though we know they are not alive, we can easily be mesmerized by them, buying into their feigned words and movements until we are fully captivated by a construction of fabric scraps or wood. In a clever ventriloquism act, it is the puppet that has us in stitches, not the human.
We are so vulnerable to this form of anthropomorphism that puppets can even scare us. If you stopped at a bed and breakfast on a country road, would you be able to sleep if the room you rented contained a few ventriloquist dummies?
Our tendency to anthropomorphize is essentially the same trick that AI uses to convince us it is a person. Once you get into a conversation with it, it’s hard to remember you’re talking to a glorified toaster.
And in a more malevolent sense, it’s also the trick certain politicians use to hypnotize a nation into voting for them.
History has seen a long list of amoral conmen convincing the multitudes that they are altruistic patriots defending the peasants, all the while disguising their inner ruthless puppet master who intends to fill his coffers with our riches and force the rest of us into subservience or toss us into jail. Even under the best of circumstances, most politicians become the puppets of the billionaires or corporations that fund their campaigns, and we become the politicians’ puppets by voting for them.
No wonder so many people are creeped out by puppets.
Who Invented These Damn Things?
Since prehistoric times, we have obsessively made images of ourselves. It began with hand stencils painted on cave walls and evolved over millennia into the selfie.
Are these creations simply projections of the ego, like the myriad sexy selfies that infest social media, or something more profound?
It has been proposed that, in a Biblical sense, we are unconsciously emulating our creator by creating objects in our own image. That’s an interesting perspective; it’s hard to deny that those who developed and unleashed AI seem to see themselves as gods.
Whatever Muppet creator Jim Henson’s motives were, I can’t deny that certain Muppets bear a striking resemblance to people I know. The older I get, the more I seem to be morphing into a living version of Gonzo, and I’m convinced that Oscar the Grouch was fashioned after my father’s reaction to the way other people drive.
Perhaps we are all puppets of one sort or another. Do you ever feel as though there are one or more hands up your backside? A determined puppet master would make sure we’d be the last to find out our perceived autonomy is an illusion.
Technology and capitalism spring to mind as metaphorical puppet masters. We didn’t ask to spend our lives working our asses off at meaningless jobs to earn enough food coupons to survive, or to have to jump through hoops to prove we’re not robots so we can hack our way into our own bank accounts, but our puppet masters now demand it.
In some ways, I think my puppet comics may be a form of therapy to help me deal with life with so many hands up my butt. Maybe they can help assuage your aching bum, as well.
Notice how happy the muppets above are now that their overlords have decided to take a break. I’m reminded of the way we all feel on weekends and holidays.
What’s the story with so-called gingerbread men? I’m reminded of the theory that team sports are a relatively harmless substitution for war; could these cookies be a bloodless stand-in for cannibalism? Was Jeffrey Dahmer’s kitchen full of them? Should it have been?
For readers not acquainted with this spurious American folklore: History is written by the liars.
On the topic of war, is it just me, or are the wealthy draft dodgers in government the quickest to put the rest of us patriotic puppets in harm’s way?
The Myth of Independence
Since 1776, those of us fortunate enough to live in a democracy have lauded the glories of being free and independent. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are essential elements of a free society, but it is equally essential to realize that independence is never complete. All of us are eternally dependent on the food our planet produces, the weather that makes it possible, the air we breathe, and the peaceful cooperation of others.
To deliver one more blow to this metaphor I’ve already beaten to death, the marionette in the comic below may yearn for freedom, but it would inevitably lead to suicide. All of us bear strings that are attached to everyone else.
Author’s note: No puppets, Muppets, or marionettes were harmed in the production of this article. The scissors in that final cartoon were deleted before he could use them.
Take a peek at my graphic novel in progress: PeyoteCowboy.net.
And here’s my video inviting you to become a supporter of Peyote Cowboy.