Sesame St S7 Clips #2
Kermit and Grover also appear in the next clip, albeit in a far less funny capacity:
So, as you see, it’s basically just Kermit drawing a K as Grover watches and then responds with a light little pun on “K” being short for “Ok”. Not much more to add than that, but it’s nice to see a Kermit/Grover scene not ending with the frog in tears for once.
Moving onto other clips I found on YouTube, we have a great 2-part sketch in which the Count sleeps over at Bert and Ernie’s. In Part 1, Bert says goodnight to Ernie and the Count before going off to the living room. He’s giving the Count his bed for the night and will instead sleep on the couch. An exhausted Ernie is all ready to go to sleep, but his vampiric companion for the evening is wide awake (sound familiar?). Ernie, therefore, suggests doing what Bert tells him to do when he can’t sleep: count sheep. The Count responds with what is possibly my new all-time favorite pun, “Count Sheep? Who’s that?” Ahahahahahaha. Ernie explains himself, saying that if the Count imagines sheep jumping over a fence and counts them, it will help him drift off to sleep. Ernie, however, seems to have forgotten the cardinal rule about never suggesting the Count count anything, as rather than getting the Count to sleep, it merely invigorates him. He counts louder and louder, doing his patented laugh, with the ensuing thunder crashes and lightning flashes, as any viewer would expect and Ernie should have.
The next morning, in Part 2, we find a happy, rested Bert–who, not having had to share a room with Ernie, has probably just had his first good night’s sleep in years–and a happy, rested Count. When Bert tells him he’s glad he slept well, the Count corrects him: “Who slept?” As it turns out, he has indeed been counting sheep all night, and it has given him the most wonderful night of his life. Ernie, on the other hand, is practically a zombie. He wanders into the room in an almost-robotic daze, eyes wide open but surrounded by wrinkles, mindlessly intoning numbers: “43,891…43,892…” and so on and so forth, clearing picking up where the Count had left off, while the Count chipperly asks Bert if he could stay over again tonight. Ernie bellows from off-screen. What’s so great about this entire sequence is that–even though Bert kindly doesn’t point this out to him–in one night, Ernie has gotten his richly-deserved comeuppance saved up for the thousands of times he’s kept Bert awake while he was trying to sleep. We see that when Ernie interacts with Cookie, he’s often placed in the Bert position, and here, it’s perhaps even more so, since the Count, like Ernie under normal circumstances, didn’t mean to bother Ernie at all. He’s just entirely self-centered and thoughtless to anyone’s needs but his own.
Ernie, after the Count sleeps over.
And our last clip of the season is, in some ways, an interesting response to that, as it’s a case where Bert and Ernie are both on basically even footing throughout, with the two of them alternately take the winning position, until finally Bert suprisingly emerges the ultimate victor. The sketch, called “The TV Chair,” centers on the two best friends fighting over who is going to get to sit in this big comfy chair and watch TV. First, Bert arrives, getting ready to sit down, but Ernie sneaks into the chair as Bert is going to turn the TV on. Then, in retaliation, Bert turns off the TV and pretends to leave, so that, when Ernie then gets up to turn on the TV himself, Bert can steal the chair back. This lasts briefly, until Ernie tricks Bert by looking out the window and pretending that there’s an elephant parading down Sesame Street. As Bert goes to check the window, Ernie again plants himself in the chair. A scuffle ensues, which ends with the two of them realizing they can both fit in the chair side by side.
And though you might think that would be the end of it, no, there’s still another twist to come, when Herry Monster arrives, claiming that a dinosaur has managed to escape the museum and is now in their bedroom! Without taking a moment to consider his story, the two jump up and run to their bedroom (incidentally, they run to the right, even though, in the last sketch, their bedroom was located to the left, although we were probably just seeing the apartment from the opposite side in that scene, as the front door is usually depicted as being on the left), leaving Herry free to take the chair himself. Rather than arguing with him, however, they simply ask him to move over, all three fitting on the chair, albeit without much wiggle room. Only then do we have the final twist–namely that, this entire time, Ernie and then Herry had been so driven to watch TV that they hadn’t stopped to ask Bert what they would be watching. As it so happens, they’ll be watching a marching band (which Bert refers to as “rock n’ roll”), the weather, and then the piece de resistance, The Wonderful World of Pigeons. Ernie and Herry take one look at each other and instantly vacate the premises!
It’s a great Sesame Street scene to end our survey of this season on, because, while a number of lessons are woven into the fabric of the sketch–from counting to cooperation to the importance of asking for context and examining people’s words instead of just taking their truthfulness for granted–it never announces itself as an educational piece. Instead, it’s primarily a comedic scene and one which, furthermore, views the Bert/Ernie dynamic from a different angle than usual and even ultimately allows Bert a solid win, to enjoy the deeply boring stuff he considers entertainment to his heart’s content. Score one for the yellow guy! And please come back next time, when I take a look at the third Julie Andrews/Muppet special, One to One!
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