“Night Life” from The Great Muppet Caper

The lyrics to this song are pretty straightforward—it’s just a rockin’ good time (covered on The Green Album). The humor and meaning is in the situation.

Kermit and Piggy leave 17 Highbrow Street to see this ramshackle bus crammed full of weirdos who begin to playfully tease them: “Hey, there they are—Kermit and his new flame!” “Hubba hubba!” “Ding ding!” Kermit and Piggy trade nervous, awkward laughs.

“You’ll have to jump in the front seat—back seat’s been quarantined.” This is clearly not the romantic ride to the restaurant that Piggy had envisioned, but she rolls with it (Kermit is worth it).

“How ’bout a little travelin’ music?” “For sure, a love song!” “Love song! Love song!” This “love song” ends up being purely about a love of rock’n’roll, which makes perfect sense to the Electric Mayhem. Piggy, on the other hand, still feels awkward. Kermit starts getting into it and moving to the music.

When I began scrutinizing this scene for this post, at first I wondered why Kermit seems to make this shift from being embarrassed by his friends to innocently normalizing them: “Just the ones on the fenders”; “That’s OK, they don’t mind.”

Then I realized that he’s only embarrassed when they’re teasing him and Piggy about their budding romance. He’s embarrassed about having a spotlight shone on that tender, tentative, unknowable moment. He’s not embarrassed by his friends themselves, the way they exist in the world, or how they make him look by association.

Kermit may be the most normal of the main group of Muppets, the one who can most easily move through the rest of the world hearing only a couple of offhanded comments about his being a frog. But in his heart of hearts, he is still a Muppet. He’s not ashamed of these weirdos because he’s one of them, and he’s not ashamed of himself.

May we all introduce the weirdos in our lives to the normies in our lives with the same kind of matter-of-fact belonging and bouncy joy.