The Muppets 1.05: “Walk the Swine”
Piggy and Reese are not happy with each other.
And the comedy builds even further from that point, when the two finally do have an all-out confrontation, Piggy trying to get a recording of Reese conceding that Piggy had won at construction to use as her new ringtone, and Reese responding, “You know what my ringtone is? The sound of people clapping when I won my Oscar…KABOOM!” At this point she grabs Piggy’s phone, holding it out of her reach, and things finally start getting a bit physical between them, Piggy pushing Reese into one of the walls of the house, and that wall then collapsing to the ground, in full view of all of the reporters and paparazzi that Piggy herself had called there. In order to save face, Piggy tries to pretend it was an earthquake, a moment later hilariously knocking Reese to the ground. “Aftershock!” she calls out.
As it turns out, this tactic doesn’t work, however, and both stars suffer a mountain of bad press, with many guests canceling their appearances on Up Late and even some sponsors threatening to pull out, until Piggy finally does something mature: she decides to have Reese on her show to apologize to her, which makes Kermit so nervous, he can hardly function. And yet once she has Reese there, it all seems to be going swimmingly…until after Reese apologizes, and Piggy responds by launching into a full-blown production number with chorus boys, confetti, and even an extended rap portion, making the entire thing all about her in the Piggy-est way imaginable. “And that is how you apologize, Reese Witherspoon. I win, I win, I win!,” she calls out to her at the end, the song–complete with some of the most jaw-dropping, how-did-they-do-that? puppetry of the show to date–that line, and Reese’s stunned reaction making me laugh harder than anything else in the entire episode and more than justifying the entire plot. And again, it wasn’t even this story per se that was the issue but how it sits in the series as a whole up to this point.
I could voice similar concerns over Fozzie’s plot, in which he discovers that he can finally get laughs during his stand-up set when he makes jokes at the expense of Becky, his girlfriend from the pilot (once again played by the wonderful Riki Lindholme), however I feel like the show has shown enough different facets to Fozzie by this point that I’m okay with him being a bit thoughtless in this story. For example, in the previous episode, we saw him go out of his way to help the wounded Statler, and in the second episode, we saw his sense of hurt when Kermit didn’t like the script he’d written, so while this falls under a similar gray moral area to his stealing Jay Leno’s dish, it’s not like we’re suddenly seeing a dark, cynical Fozzie.
Piggy apologizes.
In fact, any time he behaves “badly,” it springs from a place of wanting to be a good comedian and loved by an audience. With Leno, he was just so in awe that someone of his caliber thought highly of his work, he got carried away, and here he similarly gets carried away. And I can totally see Fozzie noticing how other comedians always get laughs from making-fun-of-their-girlfriends jokes, and so trying to do the same but going overboard. And I like that she manages to give him a taste of his own medicine by telling jokes about his personal quirks to his friends, and then even finally allows him to joke about her when she realizes how badly he’s bombing at the comedy club the next night (“He’s making a room full of people miserable just for you!” Pepe beams). The fact that he was willing to sacrifice for her, and then she responds by sacrificing for him is really sweet.
But I do think the tag, in which he then starts to also make fun of her feet, which she clearly isn’t okay with, goes a little too far, much as the previous episode’s tag did. There, Statler and Waldorf went out of their way in being as over-the-top evil as possible, and it came across as a bit too mean-spirited, and here Fozzie himself seems a bit too callous in again not caring about how she feels at all. Again, he gets a bit carried away, so I can justify it to an extent, but it still feels like the characters are being sacrificed a bit in order to accommodate a punchier tag. When people say the new show is too cynical, it’s due to moments such as this. As much as I love the show overall, I feel like it needs a greater counterbalance of warmth so it can pull off these sorts of jokes without seeming like the Muppets have lost their heart.
Meanwhile, the episode’s other subplot is a cute recurring bit in which Rizzo, amusingly driving a huge truck, barrels into Scooter’s new car, and then tries to convince him to go to a succession of his shady rat relatives rather than the insurance company, and I absolutely loved this section with no reservations whatsoever, being the funniest material we’ve gotten from Rizzo so far. Of course he has a scam artist family and of course he’s able to talk the gullible, affable Scooter into anything. It’s another terrific case of the show taking long-running characters and finding new dynamics to play between them.
And a few other things:
Fozzie and Becky (Riki Lindholme).
–I love Floyd refusing to give the barista his real-name. Because naturally Floyd is paranoid.
–There’s a great and easy-to-miss shoutout to Adele Dazeem when Piggy passive aggressively introduces her guest as “the wickedly talented Reese Witherspoon!”
—Kermit: “Piggy will stop at nothing to even the score. I mean, I broke up with her, and I know my day’s coming. It’s why I say a little prayer every time I start my car.”
–Uncle Deadly giving Miss Piggy’s spanx a “brava!” for their hard work tonight. Enough said.
–This bit of brilliance:
Gonzo: How about I write the ending, you [Pepe] write the middle, and you [Rizzo] write the beginning?
Rizzo: How would I know when to stop?
Gonzo: Good point.
–You gotta love when the entire gang starts a rousing chorus of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” and Zoot later plays it on the sax, when they discover that it makes Fozzie emotional. The more music on this show, the better!
–And my vote for best moment of the entire episode goes to the brilliant exchange in which Rizzo keeps mistaking Pepe’s declaration of love for Sean Penn, thinking he’s saying “champagne,” due to his accent. It’s one of those bits that just gets funnier as it goes along, since each time Pepe repeats the name “Sean Penn,” it does actually sound even more like champagne!
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