The Muppet Show 1.04: “Ruth Buzzi”
The fake frog whispers sweet nothings into Piggy’s ear.
Later on, however, the concept does yield fantastic results, when we finally get another scene of Piggy throwing herself at Kermit (the first since the first episode)–calling him “Frog of my heart!” for the first time–and being rejected. Our melodramatic porcine diva responds with sighs that reach Shakespearean heights, “Oh, wretched day, for a pig in her prime to be thus scorned!” She then retires to her dressing room where lo and behold! there is a fully willing Kermit awaiting her, albeit one who is a bit more forward and crass than she’d like (“Hiya, good lookin’, where you been all my life?” he calls to her), in addition to being a robot.
At first, she’s thrown by Kermit being inside the room a moment after she thought he’d gone on stage, and then she becomes even more thrown when he amorously advances on her. The robot tells her they’ll have “a marriage made in heaven: a frog and a pig! We can have bouncing baby figs!” Interestingly, this all also foreshadows Muppets Most Wanted, where as soon as Piggy gets what she thinks she wants–a Kermit seemingly entirely receptive to marrying her–she realizes that something is wrong, and that is that a Kermit with no reservations isn’t her Kermit. In other words, his playing-hard-to-get is part of the appeal for her. (Additionally, a dream sequence in the same film has her visualizing their future combination-frog/pig children.)
In fact, the fake Kermit here comes on so strong that it inspires her to perform her first two ever karate chops (she had punched Kermit in the Connie Stevens episode but hadn’t gone full karate)! Unfortunately for the real Kermit, she uses them on him rather than the robot, as he comes up behind her at just the wrong moment and she hasn’t yet realized there are two Kermits, let alone that one is a wind-up toy! When the doppelganger pops up behind her again and says, “I think you may have dented him,” she then faints dead away, landing on top of poor Kermit. “The frog broke her fall,” the robot snarkily remarks.
In the very final moments of the show, the backstage plot actually shockingly dovetails with Ruth Buzzi, albeit only in a very surface way, firstly only thematically in the panel debate, where they discuss “Is the Human Body Obsolete?” and Buzzi’s character, Gloria Goodbody, brings up robots, and then in Kermit’s goodbye bit at the end. The Mechanical Wind-Up TV Show Host tries to take over his hosting duties by bidding Buzzi farewell but, due to a technical glitch, he starts to repeat “Booth Ruzzi – Booth Ruzzi – Booth Ruzzi” over and over, before ultimately shorting out–the latest in a series of comedic bits throughout Jim Henson’s career in which a robot that had seemed a potentially perfect replacement for a human begins to malfunction. But luckily, Kermit’s standing by to reclaim his job!
Other points of interest:
–The Electric Mayhem kicks things off with a great number, “Sunny,” that really starts to establish Animal as a character. It begins as a slow, bluesy song, but Animal soon grows impatient with the tempo and so begins to drum faster and faster and louder and louder, forcing all of the others in the band to follow suit until they all get so overworked, they pass out from exhaustion…All except for Animal, natch. And shortly afterwards, Animal has another great bit, when Waldorf tells Statler that he think he’s going to go stretch his legs and Animal suddenly pops up in their box, saying, “I’ll do it for you,” and begins to literally stretch them to cartoonish lengths! Animal’s definitely starting to come into his own here, interestingly the first Electric Mayhem member so far to start getting fleshed out.
Rowlf never harmed an onion.
–In their number, Wayne and Wanda get further into their song than at any other point (ever, as far as I recall) before disaster strikes. They sing a song from the 1912 Ziegfeld Follies called “Row, Row, Row” (another example of Jim really digging into the lost-songs archives for material) and make it all the way through to the chorus before their boat sinks beneath the waves! Incidentally, in Season 3, guest star Elke Sommer will sing the same song with the same result!
–Speaking of old, forgotten songs, Rowlf sings a punny gem from the 1950s called “I Never Harmed an Onion,” whose premise is that the singer is wondering why onions make him cry when he never did them any harm. Some of the best lines include, “I made a melon bawl,” and “I saw a salad dressing!” It’s the perfect song for Rowlf, and Jim’s performance is naturally magnificent, the gruff dog devolving into comedic tears as he sings.
–Fozzie’s comedy act in this episode is far more typical of how these segments normally went vs. what happened in the Joel Grey episode, when Statler and Waldorf inexplicably liked his joke. Here, they heckle him from start to finish, as per their horrible personalities. Some of the more memorable exchanges include Fozzie telling the audience they’re in for a real treat, and Waldorf responding, “You mean you’re finished?” and later on, when Waldorf yells out, “You’re one of the top comics in the business!”…Statler: “In the world!”…Waldorf: “In the business world!”
I’ve spoken earlier about how the audience initially had trouble connecting to Fozzie, the main reason being how pathetic he was early on, and here you can see he really does come across entirely as a victim. Not only do Statler and Waldorf outwit him over and over, but eventually, he’s practically begging them to stop. On the plus side, this particular segment does end on a bit of an up-note for Fozzie when Waldorf pays him the backward compliment that he’s “the greatest straight man in the business. You’ve never been funnier!” and Fozzie takes it as an utter triumph, leaving with a beaming smile of joy on his face. On the one hand, this sort of utter optimism about his talents despite any evidence to the contrary is very Fozzie, but on the other, here it’s based on such a misunderstanding that he still comes across as too desperate.
Later on, once there was better give-and-take between Fozzie and the old codgers on a more regular basis, this might have worked better, and, for someone watching today who knows where the characters will go later, this doesn’t actually stand out as significantly out of place, but I can definitely see how, without this later context, the joke is too much “pathetic, unfunny bear being verbally abused by jerks, and without the means or wit to fight back”. We’re supposed to be on his side, but at this point, it’s hard not to think that Statler and Waldorf are right, albeit being too mean about it.
Statler and Waldorf harrass the bear.
–This episode also marks the first appearance of the Talking Houses, another Season 1 sketch that solely revolved around telling lame jokes rather than developing characters. In this one, one house tells the other that he had heard that her son was thinking of being more religious, and she responds that, yes, “he’s seriously considering becoming a monastary.”
–The debate spot also contains a bit of weirdness, where Piggy gets very amorous with a male pig. Although it’s at least within the context of a sketch, it still feels outrageously out of character for her, especially with Kermit as the presenter in the scene and given the fact that the division between off-stage and on-stage Muppet personas was always so amorphous.
And so we have yet another flawed Season 1 episode, this time around featuring a truly superb guest star perfectly suited to the Muppets and yet let down to a degree by a faulty script. If only the fat jokes were eliminated, the backstage plot edited to remove redundancies, and more direct participation from Ruth Buzzi woven into that plot, this could have been The Muppet Show‘s first truly classic episode. Instead we have to settle for a typically fun but imperfect Season 1 affair with at least one exquisite moment in Buzzi and Sweetums’ number and a great Kermit-and-Piggy romance bit that hints at a great deal of potential–but potential that won’t be fully realized until later.
Next time: Harvey Korman!
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