Sesame St S3: Bert & Ernie
My, what big eyelids you have, Bert!
Ernie probably doesn’t mean to drive Bert crazy in “Cookies in Bed”, either, although he’s even more thoughtless in this very short but classic scene, in which Ernie is eating cookies in bed, and Bert warns him against it, telling him he’ll get cookies in the sheets, which will make him itch, and Ernie thanks him profusely for saving him from this fate. He will never eat cookies in his bed again. His solution? Eating cookies in Bert’s bed! He climbs in with his friend, munching cookies all the while, and asks him to move over. Ah, the stuff that slash is made from!
And continuing a similar theme, Ernie comes home in “Ernie Tries Not to Wake Bert” to discover that Bert has fallen asleep in his armchair. He can tell that Bert’s asleep because his eyes are actually closed, depicted via a funny but extremely odd-looking closed-eye-lash effect. At first he tries to think of things he can do that won’t bother Bert, however everything from watching TV to playing with a ball would make too much noise. So, instead, he decides to go to sleep in the chair besides Bert. Which is sweet, except for the fact that he begins to snore so loudly that Bert awakens in a fright and subsequently makes so much noise that he wakes Ernie up. “Bert, you woke me up!” Ernie cries. “Is that any way to treat me after all the nice things I did for you?!” Again, Bert can’t win for losing! Not unlike Ernie yelling at Herbert Birdsfoot due to his own imagination having run away from him, here he gets mad at a completely innocent Bert as the result of him having tried but failed to be thoughtful towards Bert!
Ernie’s head also seems to not be fully on straight in “Ernie Forgets Something After His Bath”, when Bert enters the bathroom to discover that Ernie’s just gotten out of the tub but can’t remember something he’s sure he hasn’t done. Bert asks if he’s washed behind his ears. Yup. Did he wash his face? Yes. His hands? His wrists? His neck? Yes, yes, yes. Then he realizes the problem. As a huge flood of water begins to rise up to Bert and Ernie’s necks, it occurs to him that he might have forgotten to turn off the water!
And then we come to one that probably has the most prominent lesson thus far, namely cooperation. In “Peanut Butter Sandwiches”, Ernie brings food home from the store to a very grateful Bert, who is extremely hungry. For himself, he’s brought a loaf of bread, for Bert a jar of peanut butter. And without thinking, Ernie starts to eat a piece, expecting that to be his meal and the peanut butter to be Bert’s. Poor Bert asks Ernie how the bread is, and he replies that it’s “Kind of dull” with nothing on it. At which point Bert suggests that maybe he could put some peanut butter on it, at which point Ernie is stuck with a brilliant and crazy idea. What if he puts peanut butter on bread for both himself and Bert, and then they can both have peanut butter sandwiches?! You have to give credit to Bert for not strangling him there, but it’s possible that he’s just too weak from hunger.
Ernie realizes what he forgot to do.
Anyway, Ernie makes the sandwiches and they’re both happy, except for the fact that, as with Grover, the peanut butter has made their mouths very sticky. “We need someone to cooperate with,” Ernie suggests. “We need someone who’s hungry who has a bottle of milk!” Not necessarily the funniest Bert and Ernie sketch ever but a sweet one overall. Bert is actually fairly patient with Ernie, and Ernie ultimately comes up with a solution that benefits both of them.
But let’s take a look at one in which Ernie not only has good intentions but they actually pay off: “Big Shelf, Little Shelf”! In this sketch, Bert is trying to read the paper when Ernie asks him whether he should put Bert’s favorite vase on the big shelf or the little shelf. Bert doesn’t want to be disturbed and asks him to figure it out for himself but warns him that if Ernie puts it on the wrong shelf, it could fall off and break. Of course, the moment we hear the phrases “Bert’s favorite vase” and “break” in conjunction with Ernie, we are sure we can tell where this is going. And yet we end up being wrong! Ernie realizes that the best way to solve the problem would be to imagine what would happen if he put the vase on either shelf. He begins with the first one–which is tiny–and he is so sure it will tip off and break, he actually hears the shattering sound in his head, followed by Bert screaming at him and then kicking him onto the street, where it’s cold. Cue blowing wind noise!
By this point, Ernie has become so overwhelmed with his emotions that he begins to sob. Bert asks him what’s wrong and, upon hearing the answer, suggests Ernie imagine what would happen if he put the vase on the larger shelf, which he does. Ernie imagines Bert praising him to the heavens, and then throwing him a party. “He wouldn’t have to do that,” Ernie explains, “but he probably would”. And then he imagines Bert giving him a toy truck! By the time he puts the vase on the shelf, he can hear trumpets blaring in triumph in his head. Soon afterwards, Bert, who has just finished his reading, thanks Ernie for putting the vase in the right spot. “No, Bert, don’t thank me,” he says, still high from the rush of the imagined festivities. “You’ve already done enough. Not another word, Bert! The party! The trumpet! After all, all I did was put your vase on the shelf!”
Ernie shows Bert where he put the cookies.
What I love about this sketch is that it repeats the familiar set-up of Ernie’s imagination running away from him to the point that he has trouble distinguishing between it and reality, along with Ernie succumbing to intense emotions over these imagined events, except here, it doesn’t end up biting anyone. He gets carried away, but he also ends up making the right decision, and both he and Bert are happy in the end.
That doesn’t happen in “Fish in the Cowboy Hat” (just ignore the uploader’s weird editing), in which Ernie gets similarly whimsical but Bert ends up as frustrated as usual. It begins with Ernie attempting to put a pot on Bert’s head, but Bert stops him. Why in the name of Pete is Ernie trying to do this? What follows is an epic chain-of-events cause-and-effect explanation reminiscent of “The House That Jack Built” but making even less logical sense. Ernie tells Bert that he accidentally broke the cookie jar, and so put the cookies into the sugar bowl. But then where is the sugar, Bert reasonably asks. Ernie responds that he put it in the flower pot. Then where are the flowers? The milk bottle! The milk, meanwhile, now resides in the soda bottle, the soda is now in the fish bowl, and the fish is swimming around in Bert’s cowboy hat. “Now what am I gonna wear when I wanna play cowboy?” Bert cries. Why, the pot, of course! I think what I love most about this one is the fact that, in order for Ernie to have done all of these things, he would have had to start backwards! Instead of just, y’know, buying a new cookie jar!