Of Misers and Muppets

His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

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You know them, you love them — expressive little stuffed animals so authentically wrinkled that they appear to be made out of nothing but yards of felt and puddles of toddlers' saliva.  But what commerce, you may ask, have these children's toys, these Muppets, with pillars of Victorian literature?

According to Brian Henson, quite a bit.

Setting his sights on none other than Charles Dickens, Himself™, Henson released A Muppet Christmas Carol just in time for Christmas 1992, dedicating the film to his recently deceased father, Jim, Muppet mastermind.  In so doing, he initiated decades of Yuletide traditions for families innumerable — presumably, at least.  He certainly did for my family.  My siblings and I grew up watching the oddly corporeal Muppet ghosts cavorting around Michael Caine's relentlessly stoic Scrooge on at least a semi-annual basis.

And yet, if I'm to be ruthlessly honest, I never loved it.  I liked parts of it, of course, but it never became a personal favorite, then or now.  In fact, in recent years, I developed a rather active dislike of the story.  In 2022, however, I decided to reread the book for the first time in several years, and I must say that I enjoyed it more than I ever have before.  (Fun fact!  This post has been in draft since then.  Since 2022. 😁  I have fantastic time management skills when it comes to blogging, as you can tell. 😌)  I reread it again this month for the purposes of finishing this post, and it was, once again, a reasonably fun time.

Even now, though, I'm forced to admit that — no matter what the format, no matter what the reimagining — at the heart of A Christmas Carol lies a story that not even the visionary auteurs at Mattel can twist into something I genuinely, meaningfully enjoy very much.  I am, simply put, a Scrooge when it comes to Scrooge.  The "grumpy, miserable person learns how to appreciate the Christmas season and, by extension, their Life in General" trope is just not for me, folks (with the sole and sacred exception of The Christmas Miracle of Jonathon Toomey, which is a magnum opus of a Christmas book and no mistake).  

I'm not exactly sure whence my antipathy to this premise comes, but as the answer to that question isn't particularly relevant today, we shall set it aside for the present.  Suffice it to say, in the interests of full disclosure, that I don't actually care for this story very much.  However, as I was rereading the novella in 2022, I began to wonder why it lent itself so well to an adaptation headed by Henson's Muppets.  Because, even though I didn't actually, personally care for the finished product that much, the premise of A Muppet Christmas Carol still delighted me, and I still felt plenty of nostalgic affection for it.  So what, I wondered, makes the movie so fun (even if the fun is transient, as it is for me)?

The only conclusion to which I've come, after a not inconsiderable amount of cogitation (see: post in draft for two full years), is that retelling the story with children's toys enables the retelling to better evoke the whimsy, humor, and general folderol that undergird Dickens' work.  It turns the spotlight squarely onto the mirth present in the original tale.  It forces viewers to understand that, yes, there's a Lesson™ here, but at the end of the day, this is a pretty humorous little story about a grumpy, entitled rich guy getting his privileged derriere handed to him by not one, not two, not three, but four supernatural beings absolutely refusing to let him get a solid night's sleep on Christmas Eve.  (RIP to Eben's undereyes.)

"I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer."

"You were always a good friend to me," said Scrooge. "Thankee!"

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."

Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost's had done.

"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?" he demanded in a faltering voice.

"It is."

"I — I think I'd rather not," said Scrooge.

Why make a film adaptation of A Christmas Carol funny?  Because A Christmas Carol is funny.  "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population," is a hideous anthropological philosophy, to be sure, but it's also objectively hilarious in its very hideousness.  Bob Cratchit "involuntarily" applauding Fred's pro-Christmas speech while wrapped in his comforter is objectively hilarious.  "Go and buy it." "Walk-ER!" is objectively hilarious.  

And that's where the genius of the Muppets comes in.  Their presence in A Muppet Christmas Carol draws out the humor latent within the story, and it prevents the narrative from bogging down (as, in my opinion, it is wont to do without them).  Their sly quips and screwball antics give the classic some Verve™, if you will.  The "This Is My Island in the Sun" dance break; the entire London neighborhood absolutely dragging Scrooge through the mud as he walks to work; Miss Piggy being chaotic ("And I am about to raise you rIGHT OFF THE PAVEMENT!!!"); Gonzo and Rizzo heckling each other non-stop; Rizzo Himself, Generally™ . . . it's all delightful, and the movie is worth watching for the background Muppet moments alone.  (Of course, it must be observed that, while the Muppets are certainly the primary comedic force in the movie, Michael Caine more than holds his own in the humor department.  He makes Scrooge plenty funny in his own right.  "Please, don't criticize me, lads — 😡you were always criticizing me!!😡")

Mixing intrinsically "silly" children's toys with the work of such a literary giant as Charles Dickens also introduces an irreverence to the product that I find extremely refreshing.  It is impossible to use what are essentially glorified props as the bulk of your cast and not diminish the gravity of the story you're performing in some way.  (Caine's commitment to thespian integrity, of course, notwithstanding.)  The use of this creative tactic, in this specific case, highlights the reality that Dickens is at his strongest as a humorist and at his weakest as a sociopolitical critic.  His philosophical efforts often stumble into melodrama; his comedy never falters in a similar vein.  It is when Dickens takes his work and its social ramifications least seriously that he shines.  Yes, he uses A Christmas Carol to make it clear that hoarding wealth is Bad; that neglecting to use one's privilege to help the less fortunate is Bad; that treating one's employees rudely is Bad; heck, that forgetting one's roots is Bad.  But he doesn't belabor the point or hold his readers hostage for forty-odd pages while he waxes mediocre poetic about the systemic injustice of Victorian London, as he tends to do in his other work.  This is a Christmas story, and ultimately it needs to be a pretty lighthearted one, and Dickens seems to understand that.  Enter:  Muppet tomfoolery. 

On the other hand, a case could be made that using Muppets as the supporting cast members also levels an overt thematic challenge at Scrooge's tendency to consign the "background characters" in his life to the realm of irrelevance.  The central conflict of A Christmas Carol, after all, is the fact that Ebenezer Scrooge views his fellow men as expendable.  (And, of course, that he has lost the childlike wonder that Christmas ought, ideally, to inspire in everyone, adult and child alike, but that's a tertiary issue at best.)  If anyone — man, woman, or child — fails to thrive in the capitalistic machine, then too bad for them, Scrooge says.  If they add no appreciable value to society — and, very often, even if they do — then Scrooge has no use for them and is happy to consign them to squalor, misery, and death.  Humanity, in Scrooge's worldview, is insignificant if separated from its potential for productivity, and more particularly from its potential for benefitting him, personally. 

Thus (it could be argued), literally removing the visible humanity of the secondary characters in A Christmas Carol by replacing them with inanimate props throws this central conflict into even sharper relief.  Mightn't it be even easier, after all, for Scrooge to dismiss the Cratchits, the beggars, the "idle" London townsfolk, if they're felted puppets?  Doesn't their "inhumanity" sort of let him off the hook?  You would think so — but, actually, no.  If anything, the exuberance and congeniality of the Muppets (I cannot believe that I am actually typing some of these phrases with my own ten fingertips) forces Scrooge (and, by extension, you) to care much more about their characters than about those of the few human extras who populate each scene.  Characters played by children's toys "shouldn't" matter — just as, by Scrooge's logic, peasants who can't accumulate wealth shouldn't matter.  But, in both cases, they do.  They matter A Lot, in fact, and Ebenezer cannot be free of his ghostly mentors until he learns that.

Ultimately, then, I think that that is why Muppets work so well for A Christmas Carol.  They work because they affirm both the humor and the heart of the original story, in almost equal measure.  They're cute, they're sweet, they're endearing, they're cheeky, they're funny, and they're fun — and all of those, I believe, are the qualities most worth celebrating in any work by Charles Dickens.  A Christmas Carol is no exception. ♡

God bless us, everyone!

Do you like A Muppet Christmas Carol?