#and very rarely do I see like really abhorrent behavior bc everyone there is like tiptop it’s not

[dodgebolts]

I actually really like the high radiant lobbies bc everyone knows each other and in random queues it’s either fun banter or just quiet gameplay

[trendexplainer]

Kermit the Frog: It’s Not Easy Being a Meme

When Jim Henson created Kermit the Frog in 1955, he surely had no idea that his puppet would go on to become a timeless cultural icon, a celebrity in his own right, and most recently, an internet meme sensation. Yet decades before Reddit and Imgur, Kermit was already the perfect candidate to become all those things. His simple character design has remained virtually unchanged for over 60 years, making him instantly recognizable and easy to edit and remix. His static ping pong ball eyes and relative lack of features make him dependent on body language, props, and captions to express emotions. And he has appeared in hundreds of episodes of The Muppet Show and Sesame Street and starred in dozens of films, so the internet holds a dizzying array of Kermit photos to form the basis of memes. Kermit has competed on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and made the rounds on daytime and late night talk shows with multiple generations of hosts. There is not one, but two Kermit puppets behind glass at the Smithsonian. He is the most interesting frog in the world.

How could he NOT occasionally take over the internet?

According to Google Trends, the most popular Kermit meme is what Know Your Meme calls “But That’s None of My Business.” It typically features Kermit nonchalantly drinking a beverage and calling out questionable behavior or hypocrisy, asserting at the end “but that’s none of my business.” I think it’s meant to play Kermit as a gossipy casual observer, and often a condescending one. Many of these witty social observations originated in black internet subculture and made the rounds in those circles before reaching the internet at large.

There are two main incarnations of But That’s None of My Business: one of Kermit drinking tea in a 2014 Lipton advertisement, and the other of Kermit sipping milk through a straw in the very first episode of The Muppet Show (skip to about four minutes in, you’ll know it when you see it). This trend reached peak popularity in the days following June 20th, 2014, when an Instagram account was created to highlight the best of Kermit’s shade throwing and gained over 130,000 followers.

(I just want to pause here so I can imagine reading the previous sentence to Jim Henson in 1977 and wonder how he’d react to the idea of his character thriving in a bizarre, complex world Henson would never live to see.)

But That’s None of My Business enjoys blue-chip meme status to this day, but was given a brief boost on June 21st, 2016 when Good Morning America infamously tweeted a collage of popular memes and used the hashtag #tealizard to describe Kermit. Tea lizard! Predictably, Twitter lost its collective mind. Mocking of GMA as an out of touch corporate enterprise ensued, as well as the inevitable corrections that frogs are amphibians, not lizards. There was even backlash accusing GMA of whitewashing the Kermit meme by erasing its black comedian origins. In a strange turn of events, the social media coordinator for GMA tried to claim on Twitter that people have actually called this meme Tea Lizard, implicitly casting everyone else as out of touch.

Here’s the great thing about tea lizard, though: a year earlier, in the spring of 2015, scientists announced they discovered a new species of glass frog in Costa Rica that bears a striking resemblance to you-know-who:

Newly discovered frog is a Kermit look-a-like. #StopEverything #StillNewStuffInTheWorld http://t.co/8qZuTYoO3G pic.twitter.com/2e0gt5sIIf

— KariAnn Ramadorai (@KariAnnWrites) April 20, 2015

This does little to rebut the Tea Lizard truthers, and maybe we have to brush aside the fact that the original Kermit actually did look more like a lizard, but I still find it hard to believe that many people would call a fuzzy, toothless, scaleless creature—who again, calls himself a frog—a lizard.

The other famous Kermit meme has been dubbed “Evil Kermit,” and it’s taken from a screenshot of the 2014 film Muppets Most Wanted. It’s a shot of Kermit facing his evil look-alike nemesis Constantine, who is wearing a black Sith robe over his eyes. (I think it really speaks to Kermit's unique design that neither Kermit nor Constantine's face is visible in this photo but it’s still obvious who it is.) The captions always imagine the poster’s inner urges to make poor choices in the form of a two-line dialogue—essentially a version of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The tweet that started it all was posted on November 6th, 2016, and the meme grew in popularity over the following weeks, even inspiring a Miss Piggy version.

You’ll notice that the popularity bump from But That’s None of My Business has an immediate sharp decline, while the spike from Evil Kermit decreased more slowly. I have a few thoughts as to why. One, leisure time on the internet seems to increase in late December as people have time off work and school (see The Annual Cycle of Netflix Popularity). Around this time, a smaller Kermit meme—a Kermit aftershock, if you will—began to reemerge on Twitter thanks to the large following of the quirky high-concept account @jonnysun.

On December 12th, 2016, @jonnysun tweeted this:

when u give urself a gentle hug evrey night before u go to bed, reassuring urself that no mater wat, the day was yours bc u chose to live it pic.twitter.com/fTH8o5k3h9

— jomny sun (@jonnysun) December 13, 2016

This sad, fuzzy Kermit doll belongs to a 17-year-old girl from Finland named Pinja. In September 2016, she began taking photos of her Kermit in various settings and positions and posting them in a thread of tweets, which garnered attention in certain corners of Twitter. Sad Kermit originated in a tweet from Pinja about how much she missed one of her friends. When Jonny posted his own caption for Sad Kermit, he replied to it with a challenge for his followers to turn Sad Kermit into a ‘wholesome meme,’ meaning to lend it a positive and encouraging caption rather than a snide or sarcastic one. Many people obliged in the following days, and BuzzFeed has kindly curated the highlights.

@jonnysun the chalemge.. can u wholesome the sadest meme in the worlbd, i think.. no

— jomny sun (@jonnysun) December 13, 2016

I mention all this because December 12th also happens to be the point on the graph where the negative slope abruptly becomes less steep. The wholesome meme crusade wasn’t enough to stop the inevitable decline of Evil Kermit mania, but I think it did have an effect in prolonging it. I also believe (or at least I want to) that good natured humor—like the captions for Evil Kermit tend to be—naturally has stronger staying power than the condescension and criticism offered by But That’s None of My Business. Perhaps there is more social incentive to share a meme that lets people laugh at themselves or at life in general than a meme that chastises others, even if it’s also for laughs.

(If that’s true, it would be a fair criticism to point out that the snarkier meme was more popular. But I’ll remind you that trend popularity is based on how frequently Kermit was Googled as a percentage of total searches at the time, and the world got pretty busy searching for non-Kermit related subjects a couple days after November 6th.The election appearing to interfere with unrelated trends may turn out to be relatively common— it showed up at the end of How Google Trends Works too.)

My annotated graph would have you believe Evil Kermit was only 60% as popular at its peak as But That’s None of My Business, but of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. It turns out the spike for Kermit searches in April 2013 had nothing to do with Kermit the Frog, but is instead related to the conviction of abortion provider Kermit Gosnell for murder, manslaughter, and a host of other federal drug crimes related to his abhorrent cesspool of a clinic and his felonious practice of late term and even post-birth abortions. I did NOT see this coming when I set out to write a lighthearted blog about a Muppet and I don’t want it to take over this post. But clearly, using generic terms like “Kermit” to track meme popularity is subject to unintended and confounding interference.

Aside: I can’t fathom that there was a period of time when people named their sons Kermit. But lo and behold, there’s a whole side controversy over whether Kermit the Frog was named after a friend of Jim Henson…though I’ve never heard of anyone by that name born after The Muppet Show aired.

Anyways, I think choosing more specific search terms can shed some light on the popularity of the memes independently of the popularity of the Muppet himself:

trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("TIMESERIES", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"evil kermit","geo":"","time":"today 5-y"},{"keyword":"but thats none of my business","geo":"","time":"today 5-y"},{"keyword":"kermit tea","geo":"","time":"today 5-y"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"q=evil%20kermit,but%20thats%20none%20of%20my%20business,kermit%20tea","guestPath":"https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/"});

You can see three spikes we’ve talked about, but this time I’ve included two names for the tea drinking meme. Because every data point is normalized based on the largest spike, I don’t think it’s a bad assumption to compare the sum of the red and orange lines to the blue. In which case, But That’s None of My Business was more like 94% as popular as Evil Kermit. But that’s assuming there are no other aliases for the Evil Kermit Meme. One starts to get the impression Google Trends isn’t the best tool to do thorough mathematical comparisons.

So we’ve covered a case of mistaken identity with a murderer, a ridiculous Twitter gaffe, and a rare species of frog. What’s next?

Guerilla marketing, it turns out. In the midst of a summer of high-profile celebrity split-ups and divorces, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy released statements on Facebook and Twitter on August 4th, 2015 announcing they were ending their long-term romantic relationship. But— of course—they would continue to work together professionally on their upcoming TV show “The Muppets” on ABC later that fall. This generated headlines in publications like USA Today and The Hollywood Reporter, but also in the style section of The Washington Post and CNN. (Miss Piggy even did a tell-all on Good Morning America just 9 months before they would forget who Kermit is.) Some reactions contained real emotion, as the news was meant to be taken as the end of a celebrity romance that spanned decades. A few weeks later, it was announced that Kermit had found a new girlfriend, a redheaded pig named Denise. All this internet buzz set up the character dynamics for the beginning of the new TV series when it premiered September 22nd, 2015 on ABC. These news articles were a show outside a show about making a show, because sometimes the Muppets just roll three layers deep.

I find it striking that this well-timed marketing stunt generated less than half as much interest in Kermit as the creation of an Instagram account that did nothing but post pictures of Kermit mocking social faux pas. Perhaps internet users saw the drama as the corporate stunt that it was, rolled their eyes, and moved on. Either way, it’s a startling reminder to modern PR executives that no amount of focus testing, brand development, and approved social media language will give them full control over what happens to their intellectual property.

Also striking is the fact that I just referred to Kermit as intellectual property and it probably felt a little odd to think about him in such cold legal terms. It did to me when I first typed it. But it’s true: as of 2004, Kermit the Frog is the property of an international media conglomerate called The Walt Disney Company. And by the way, so is C-3PO, Epic Rap Battles of History, and Good Morning America (which airs on ABC, yet another Disney subsidiary). We try to ignore the faceless corporations behind our beloved fictional characters the way we try not to think about how dirty our belts must get when we buckle them before washing our hands: often successfully, but not always. But the Muppets are different than virtually every other TV and movie character because the media and pop culture in general seem bent on pretending that the Muppets are real people.

Okay, yes, C-3PO, R2-D2, and BB-8 did appear at the Oscars last year and give a shout-out to John Williams. And sure, there is an entire attraction at Disney World premised on the droids being real. And yes, okay, fine, live Stormtroopers march around Disney’s Hollywood Studios. But that’s pretty much the extent of their interaction with the real world, and it’s the same for Disney’s other characters. Mickey and Minnie don’t give interviews to journalists and run official Twitter accounts. They don’t even speak! They interact with the real world by giving kids hugs, autographs, and photo-ops. Adults join in too, one reason being to have fun with their kids, a more cynical reason being the $95per person incentive they paid just for the opportunity. But I suspect most guests - kids included - know it isn’t real but play along anyways because there’s no other place where you can get a big hug from a 7-foot tall Pooh Bear. It’s special not because The Walt Disney Company or grown-ups say it’s real, but because we let it be real.

So it goes for the Muppets, but for some reason, we let them take their reality way farther into ours. It probably has to do with the way they entered the public consciousness through a variety show about making a variety show guest starring real human celebrities decades before wacky meta hijinks became popular. (One surefire way to attract praise and adulation from Hollywood is to affectionately and relentlessly lampoon it.) Audiences became used to seeing the Muppets interact with human stars. Next thing you know, the Muppets are being invited to speak in public and make TV guest appearances of their own. Kermit was evenbeing credited a the author of a best-selling book. The crossovers between Muppet world and the real world became part of their charm. But unlike Mickey, Pooh Bear, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, normal people like you and I can’t go to a theme park or a mall and shake their hands. The Muppets were accessible only to celebrities, which made them celebrities on their own.

Of course, the real reason non-celebrities can’t meet the Muppets in person is because it would be impossible to hide the talented voice actors and puppeteers who bring them to life below the camera, and seeing how the sausage gets made would shatter the layers of pseudo-reality they’ve fabricated for themselves. So rarely are the human performers behind the Muppets recognized for their work. They generally get press only when the story is about the current Muppet production itself rather than the actual Muppets. It has become totally normal for reporters to interview Muppets in character. It’s been argued that this practice makes reporters complicit in providing free advertising for Muppet movies and TV shows under the guise of arts journalism. Is the charade necessary for the Muppets to stay unique and relevant in our postmodern TV world?

I was thinking about the media and the future of the Muppets when just last Sunday, Sesame Workshop introduced Julia, a young Muppet with autism who will join the cast of Sesame Street on April 4th. David Folkenflik’s segment on NPR’s Morning Edition and Lesley Stahl’s segment on 60 Minutes include brief scenes where they talk to Abby Cadabby, Big Bird, and Elmo in character. Neither of them really needed to do this for their stories to work, but there’s something irresistibly charming about getting to interview Muppets. In NPR’s segment in particular, the in-character exchange with Abby set up how the Muppets describe Julia and her condition before Folkenflik moved on to the substance: interviewing the actors and showrunners at Sesame Workshop. With a format allowing for extended segments, 60 Minutes went more in-depth about how Sesame Street began as an experiment in educational television for children and how they continue their mission today. The Sesame Workshop conducts extensive research and consultation with educators and child psychologists to develop their characters and programming. They reached out to 14 autism advocacy groups for input into how to best portray the condition, and published books and digital content featuring Julia before bringing her onto Sesame Street. The Workshop hopes to familiarize non-autistic children with the kinds of behaviors autistic children commonly exhibit. And by showing how Julia fits into her group of Muppet friends, they hope to send the message that autistic kids can fit into their friend groups too. This is the latest of many difficult social situations Sesame Street has tackled to help today’s children better understand the world and treat others with respect. They’ve introduced children to wheelchairs, skin color, incarceration, and even death. As long as Sesame Workshop continues to pioneer new ways to make our increasingly complex world understandable to children, I believe Muppets will have no problem staying relevant. (The real question is whether or not local PBS stations will continue receiving federal subsidies to broadcast it, and for that, you’ll have to ask Ronald Grump…I mean…you know  who I mean.)

The Muppets of the movies are like the rude older siblings of the Sesame Street Muppets. Their mission is entertainment, not non-profit children’s education. Obviously, nostalgia lends a lot of power to the Muppets, which is one reason why the 2015 TV series was marketed towards adult audiences and dealt with less than family-friendly themes.

I don’t know if the rude older sibling Muppets will forever hold the respect of the public simply because they’ve endured the test of time, regardless of what they have to offer today.

But I do know this: if I saw Joy and Sadness from Inside Out at Disney World, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to get my photo taken with them. To be honest, I think I’d be a little starstruck. I literally keep a Sadness plush doll on my bookshelf to remind me how much the message of that movie resonated with me. I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about Inside Out, and it’s made me invested in the characters to the point where if I were offered the opportunity to simply pretend to meet them, I’d have no reason not to, regardless how silly it is. Maybe some people have a similar bond with the Muppets. Maybe this country has that kind of a bond with the Muppets, so our culture gives them attention whenever they have something to say. If we're really so invested in our relationship with them, maybe we have no reason not to as well. because we’re invested and have no reason not to. The Muppets make their share of problematic (and dare I say unfunny) jokes. But their timeless, cornball humor gave them a place in our culture long enough for them to become a fixture and even make fun of themselves along the way.

Iconic, self-aware, and eager to self-parody?

Kermit didn’t need the internet to become a meme.