Jim Henson: The Biography

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Book: Read Jim Henson: The Biography for Free Online
Authors: Brian Jay Jones
While
The Washington Post
contained plenty of comics, Jim preferred the selection offered in the Washington
Evening Star
for one reason: it carried Walt Kelly’s comic strip
Pogo
.
    Only a little more than a year into its remarkable twenty-seven-year run—and, in 1950, carried in only a handful of daily newspapers—
Pogo
had already charmed its way to a position of prominence at the top of the
Evening Star
’s left-hand comics page. Set in the Georgia portion of the Okefenokee Swamp—and probably looking to Jim like an idealized version of Leland
—Pogo
starred an amiable possum whose kind nature frequently, and sometimes unwillingly, wrapped him up in the lives and machinations of a colorful cast of supporting characters, ranging from a wisecracking alligator named Albert to the self-important
faux
intellectual Dr. Howland Owl.
    Jim was an enormous fan of
Pogo
, buying the paperback reprints of the daily strips almost as fast as Simon & Schuster could print them, and would remain a fan the rest of his life. With its calm-at-the-eye-of-the-hurricane main character and colorful ensemble cast, it is no great leap to see Kelly’s fingerprints on what Jim would later create with his cast of Muppets. Indeed, Jim would always willingly and cheerily cite Kelly as an inspiration:
    Walt Kelly put together a team of characters. And it started with Pogo as the central character … a fairly normal, ordinary person … and all around him, he had Albert Alligator and a bunch of comedy characters bouncing off him. We use a very similar chemistry. Kermit is the Pogo. You have one normal person who represents the way people ordinarily think. And everything else, slightly crazier comedy characters are all around that person.
    But beyond the dynamic of his cast of characters, Kelly performed a clever sleight-of-hand with
Pogo
—a trick Jim would also master and which would, in some ways, sum up his charm as an entertainer. A skilled satirist, Kelly often used
Pogo
to comment on social and political issues, tweaking religion and eggheads, presidents, and politicians. It was snarky and sometimes subversive, butwhen coming out of the mouths of Kelly’s entertaining, disarmingly cute, funny animals, readers were inclined to let him get away with it. It was snuggly satire, a deliciously dangerous combination of art and writing—and younger readers could be entertained by the antics of the cute characters while their parents smiled over the more adult humor and themes.
    What it taught Jim Henson is that, done right, you can have it both ways. You can entertain younger audiences while still playing to adult viewers—a practice that would make Jim’s contributions to
Sesame Street
so powerful and memorable. Perhaps more important, it also showed that you could get away with being a little dangerous, provocative, or just plain deep if you did it with a smile on your face and remembered that entertainment always came first. When done right, it’s possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.
    F or Jim, who had come to appreciate in Leland that he need look no further than his own backyard for excitement, Hyattsville, Maryland, was a wealth of entertainment. Blended almost seamlessly with the neighborhoods of northeastern Washington, Hyattsville was a fully realized suburb that could reap the benefits of its urban neighbor—good roads and mass transit, easy access to museums and Washington’s touristy attractions—and still manage to feel almost as rural as Mississippi, with plenty of woods and open spaces where Jim could bird-watch or just lie on his back and stare dreamily into the sky.
    Jim particularly loved bike riding with Paul in Rock Creek Park in Washington, speeding down the tree-shaded pathways on their bikes or, at times, laughing and shouting as they pedaled a tandem. As they rode, Jim would snap pictures, usually capturing Paul only as a blur as he sped past, but delighting when he managed to keep Paul in focus by

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