Sesame Street S6: Misc.
And then a sketch revolving around the art of one Salvatore Dada, yet another character played by the Guy-Smiley-shaped Anything Muppet, the artistic subject of parody being another excellent example of how Sesame Street often sprinkled in surprisingly sophisticated references targetted to an adult audience. Here, the feather-capped artist is given a name that not only recalls the well-known modern surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, but also the Dada art movement from early 20th century Europe. It features him interacting with Biff, a construction worker Muppet who we haven’t seen much of on this site yet as I wasn’t able to find many of his clips but would would generally be seen hanging out with his silent friend, Sully:
The gist of this sketch is Biff realizing that Dada has titled each of his paintings based on how many shapes are in them. “2,” “3,” etc….until Biff gets to the last one, which he assumes will be called “5,” but which Dada has inexplicably decided to call “Chicken Soup”! Again, Sesame Street not only teaches children about things such as numbers but even about how humor works by upending expectation.
And I’ll wrap up this post with three musical scenes, the first a cute little number about the cold:
And now we have another installment of “People in Your Neighborhood,” beginning with a librarian who calls singing his verse a “novel idea,” and moving on to a plumber who cracks similar puns about that profession. And in a lovely twist of what’s expected from gender norms, the librarian is a male Muppet (voiced by Jim Henson) and the plumber is a woman (voiced by Richard Hunt)! The show has clearly come a long way from its first season in its commitment to demonstrating that anyone, male or female, can hold practically any job.
And finally, Oscar enthusiastically singing about how much he doesn’t want to play with anyone and would rather be left alone. It’s a funny song that actually also has an embedded message about how not everyone’s definition of fun is the same and how we should learn to understand and respect people when they want to be by themselves for a while, meaning one could interpret it as a stealth celebration of the introvert–other than his very extrovertedly rude dismissal of everyone.
And that’s all for today! Next time: an exploration of the Bert and Ernie sketches of Season 6!