Attaboy Matt, you’re really on to something there. The taxonomic purity of television puppets is unadulterated, conservative gold. Gosh sakes, we wouldn’t want kids to get confused by the idea that puppets or (clutch the pearls!) people might be more than one thing at the same time. No sir, we have to drive home the message that one drop of taxonomic pollution is one drop too much. I mean, if people could be more than one thing at a time, how would we know who to hate?
Yep, you’re onto something great. This is going to play really well with the fox news crowd. Asian puppets… sheesh… what is the world coming to?
“What race is Ernie is Bert? You are insane PBS and we should stop funding you,” tweeted Schlapp.
Is he really going to hitch his wagon to this “there has never been an obviously Caucasian puppet on Sesame Street” narrative? “Betty Lou” doesn’t exactly sound Korean.
I assume his premise is “because most of the puppets on Sesame Street have skin colors that are not found in real humans, those characters can represent all racial and ethnic backgrounds equally well.”
Obviously this ignores the reality of how representation works. Bert and Ernie may be yellow and orange rather than a pinkish tan, but that doesn’t mean that a kid whose family came from subsaharan Africa or central Asia is going to see their lived experiences related in those characters’ hijinks the same way a white kid would.
I’m a little less sure about Ernie’s ethnicity because I can’t find an equivalent image for him plus because he’s so dang proficient in just about every language.
Bert and Ernie have always (to me) represented Felix and Oscar from Neil Simon’s Odd Couple, so obviously New Yorkers sharing a flat.
I’ll let you figure ethnicity. to me they were simply yellow puppets with mildly humorous lessons on getting along with people (and regular bathing was something to have fun and sing about).
I dunno. did I miss something?
I think what you could be missing is that the default race in U.S. entertainment was (and likely still is) white.
It’s like in most novels, especially if we don’t know that the author isn’t specifically “not white” ‐‐ if no race is specified, we assume the characters are white.
precisely.
that is why I wanted to leave it open.
with absolutely no disrespect, I pictured them as “stereotypical NY Jews” because of the relation to Simon’s play. obviously, this was not the view of 8yo me when Sesame Street first aired, but an idea that followed from a multimedia barrage of "the weirdness of those guys as interpreted in a very rural and redneck texas place.
B&E were and are hand puppets and hand puppets have, for centuries, been used to teach moral lessons (for better or worse - see Punch and Judy for example of the latter).
The Sesame Street gang was intentionally crafted to be more multicolored/less racially identifiable than the characters from The Muppet Show, but in both cases you can usually tell which cultural / ethnic traits are dominant in any given character. For example, it’s pretty obvious that the dreadlock-sporting Clifford from Muppets Tonight (performed by Kevin Clash) was clearly a “Black” Muppet even though his skin and hair colors don’t look like any real human being.
This isn’t to say that it’s bad to have puppets that reflect the traits and cultural influences of their creators, but recognizing who isn’t currently being represented is an important step toward making shows like Sesame Street more relatable for everyone.
