Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

“Many of the things I’ve done in my life have basically been self-taught,” Jim admitted later. “I had never worked with puppets … and even when I began on television, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sure this was a good thing, because I learned as I tackled each problem. I think if you study—if you learn too much of what others have done—you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.” There was little danger of Jim doing that—he was already too far ahead of everybody else. Still, for all his success and innovation, Jim was always respectful of the work of his predecessors in television. The differences in their approaches both to puppetry and the television medium, were, he thought, simply generational—a matter of when you learned the craft and what media were available when you began performing.

Sometimes you can make a line funny just by having your character do a double take.

“Their relationship is the relationship with Jim and Frank. Jim just loved to play tricks on Frank … and Frank is Bert. Frank is very buttoned-up and uptight and compulsively neat, and Jim was just wild and off the walls and funny.” “There are certainly elements of our own personalities in Bert and Ernie,” agreed Jim.

it wouldn’t have worked without Kermit, played by Jim at his most delightfully and arm-wavingly frantic, frazzled, and frustrated. Many television critics, writing of Kermit during that pivotal first season, thought Kermit was already one of Hollywood’s great straight men—“funny not because of what he does,” wrote one reviewer, “but because of what others do around him, and because of the aplomb with which he bears their doings.”

“He’d just start calling for things, and people would start writing them down,” said Juhl, “and the whole show … was done that way.” Only Jim could make such madness seem so routine. “He had,” said Juhl, in perhaps the most apt description of Jim, “a whim of steel.”

The first week back at Elstree, the shuttle bus Jim used to ferry the Muppet team around the area—emblazoned with The Muppet Show logo on the sides—was mobbed by fans at a traffic light. In Parliament, several members of the House of Commons would “rendezvous secretly” each Monday morning “to discuss the weekend show.”

While crew members and production assistants were “running around screaming” and wondering how all the work could possibly get done, Jim was “wandering around in the middle of it all, perfectly calm, perfectly content,” said Juhl. “If The Muppet Show had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98.”

“You’ve got Jim … and all of us crazies around him at different levels of ability, different levels of knowledge, different capability as performers, and him trying to hold it all together,” explained Whitmire, “but by and large … I never saw him lose his temper.… He had a real knack for getting to the problem without scratching open the scab.”

when Jim was excited about a project, no detail was too small for his attention.

Jerry Juhl warmly recalled how “Jim taught us many things: to save the planet, be kind to each other, praise God, and be silly. That’s how I’ll remember him—as a man who was balanced effortlessly and gracefully between the sacred and the silly.”