The Muppets and Holy Nonsense

How I love the Muppets. So free of moralizing and sterile family values, they're nevertheless imbued with a joy that is, at its very core, good. I consider what they do - with all their felt and comic fury - a sort of holy nonsense.

Created by the late Jim Henson and beloved by a generation raised on their 1976-1981 television variety show and subsequent movies, the Muppets return to the big screen courtesy of cowriter-producer-star Jason Segel (a member of that generation). Lovingly crafted, amusingly self-referential and deliriously silly, The Muppets isn't just true to its tradition. It's true to a contemporary world deserving of quality family films but too often populated with the likes of Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked. It's a corrective, not a bout of nostalgia.

Segel stars as Gary, a cheerful, small-town guy who lives with his brother Walter. Walter looks, well, like a Muppet. No one remarks on this much - though a photo from the brothers' high-school prom catches Walter's date in a hilarious double take - until the pair, along with Gary's girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), visit the now-closed Muppet studio in Hollywood. When they learn of a nefarious developer's plan to take over the property, Walter convinces Kermit the Frog to come out of retirement and put on a studio-saving telethon.

Walter finds his true place in the process, but that's about the extent of the lesson-learning in The Muppets. Ever since the episode featuring the tale of the grasshopper and the ant, in which the grasshopper moves to Florida and the ant gets stepped on, it's been clear that this group is hardly interested in the moral of the story. That anti-tradition is carried on in The Muppets. Although Kermit is given to inspirational speeches, it's notable that during one of them he's flattened against the wall by an opening door.

Instead of lessons, we mostly get nonsense. Animal in anger management. Chris Cooper, as the evil developer, breaking into a gangster rap. Chickens doing a dance routine to a Cee Lo Green song (we can only assume it's called "Cluck You"). Yes, occasionally, incidentally, a lesson is learned. As Walter tells Gonzo at one point, "When I was a kid and saw you recite Hamlet while jumping your motorbike through a flaming hoop, it, well, it made me feel like I could do anything."

The holiness of this nonsense - the spiritual joy it brings - can be difficult to quantify. As Frederick Buechner wrote in The Hungering Dark, "Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes.” I happened to see The Muppets a few hours after attending a wake, one marking a particularly unexpected and senseless death. If we have such nonsensical grief in our lives, doesn't it stand that God provides nonsensical joy as a counter? A time to weep, and a time to laugh? Holy nonsense blows on the fading embers of our soul, bringing it back to glowing life.

That's not to say this nonsense is only palliative. It also points to the world of which we live in hope, a restored creation where brokenness, strife and grief are nowhere to be found. In their place, filling that welcome vacuum, there surely will be room for the silly alongside praise for the sublime.

We're far afield from the Muppets now, but maybe not so far as it might seem. "As long as there are singing frogs and joking bears," Walter says at one point, "the world can't be such a bad place after all." There's more to it, of course - much more - but the holy nonsense of the Muppets is a very good start.