The Complete History Of Dirty Puppets ~ Digital Library

Crank Yankers returns to Comedy Central this week after a 12-year hiatus. The show features puppets acting in extremely naughty ways that we are not typically used to. Although we associate felt friends with shows like Sesame Street, there’s actually a long and storied history of people using marionettes and puppets for adult entertainment as well. Let’s fire up the Wayback Machine and learn about the many times that dirty puppets have shocked and amused us.

Let My Puppets Come

Photo Credit: Amazon Prime Video

After the unexpected public success of Gerard Damiano’s groundbreaking XXX film Deep Throat, director Gerard Damiano was on top of the porn world. What did he use his newfound power for? Making a smut movie starring puppets. Let My Puppets Come is one of the most bizarre adult movies ever released, a collection of skits featuring marionettes and Muppet-style hand puppets engaging in pretty much every sex act you could think of. It’s difficult to watch, even in the skimpy 43-minute theatrical cut the producers originally released, and it’s not surprising that the world hasn’t seen a puppet porn since.

Otto & George

Photo Credit: biga614 / YouTube

The market for ventriloquism was on a steep decline in the 1980s, and although Otto Petersen had all the talent in the world, he just couldn’t grab audiences. So in the early part of the decade, Petersen took his trusty dummy George and started working extremely blue. The wooden dummy turned into a hateful, racist, sexist, homophobic monster who would antagonize audiences with non-stop streams of invective as Petersen tried to hold it together. His material was so over the top that we’re not even going to link it here, but if you Google it be warned: it’s extremely NSFW. Petersen passed away in 2014, capping off a 40-year career in entertainment that started in his teens.

Meet the Feebles

Photo Credit: South Gate Entertainment

Before Peter Jackson was the go-to guy for epic fantasy, he was a struggling New Zealand director working out his grossest material on the silver screen. His 1989 Meet the Feebles might be the weirdest thing he ever made, a seriously dark Muppet Show parody where a struggling theatrical troupe has one chance at stardom, only to blow the whole thing in an orgy of drugs, sex, violence, and profanity. Some of the scenes in this movie are still deeply shocking thirty years later, as the atmosphere is so grungy and grubby that the felt of the puppets seem to be seething with filth. It’s way more upsetting than it would have been in any other medium.

Triumph The Insult Comic Dog

Photo Credit: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert / YouTube

One of the longest-lived dirty puppets out there, Triumph made his debut on Late Night With Conan O’Brien in 1997 and has become one of the Conan franchise’s most beloved bits. Voiced by Robert Smigel, Triumph ambushes interview subjects and delivers a torrent of crude insults that would get a person punched out, but somehow are less offensive when they come out of the mouth of a small plastic dog. Triumph has plied his trade on some of the most powerful people in the world, and even released an album in 2003 entitled Come Poop With Me.

Crank Yankers

Photo Credit: Comedy Central

First premiering in 2002, the premise of Crank Yankers is simple: prank phone calls are fun to listen to, but not necessarily so fun to watch. The show gets over that hump by acting out each interaction with a cast of puppets voiced by comedians. Callers are given rough outlines and made to improvise their dialogue with unwitting partners, and because it’s produced in Nevada they don’t need permission from their marks to use the audio. Very clever. The upcoming fifth season catches up to the modern era by opening the pranksters up to social media platforms as well, which we’re curious to see how well it works.

Avenue Q

Photo Credit: Adrián Monroy / Medios y Media / Getty Images

The early days of the 21st century were a bizarrely fertile time for dirty puppets, as an Off-Broadway show revolving around them became one of the New York theatrical world’s biggest hits. Avenue Q, written by Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx, and Jeff Whitty, is a spoof on Sesame Street with humans and puppets coexisting on the Lower East Side and contending with racism, sexuality, and other grown-up issues. The show won three major awards at the 2004 Tony Awards and has gone on to successfully tour the world.

Team America: World Police

Photo Credit: Paramount HE

Say what you will about Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the fact that they used their South Park clout to produce some seriously bizarre Hollywood projects is a good thing. 2004’s Team America: World Police took the marionette action gimmick pioneered by British producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson for kids shows like Thunderbirds Are Go and applied it to a gleefully filthy farce about a group of counter-terrorists charged with stopping Kim Jong-Il from destroying the world. Sex, gore, and vomit combine and contrast with the clunky, inexpressive puppets to make this one a must-see.

Wonder Showzen

Photo Credit: Augenblick Studios

One of the most subversive shows ever aired on American television, MTV gave Wonder Showzen two seasons to warp brains with its no-holds-barred take on educational programming. Created by iconoclastic art collective PFFR, each episode features kids and puppets telling you the harsh and ugly truth about the world. One of the most notable recurring segments featured the puppet Clarence conducting man on the street interviews that would often devolve into deeply inappropriate topics of conversation. It’s a shame we never got the third season, which the team said would follow, documentary-style, a group of children trying to make the third season of Wonder Showzen.

Live Freaky! Die Freaky!

Photo Credit: You’ve Got Bad Taste Productions / Hellcat Films

While most of the dirty puppet media on this list is fairly enjoyable, they can’t always be winners. 2006’s dire Live Freaky! Die Freaky!, directed by John Roecker, is a weird, boring, faux-edgy stop motion / puppet film with voice acting from a bizarre collection of rock musicians like Joel Madden of Good Charlotte and Davey Havok of AFI. Oh, and it’s also a musical, with nearly two dozen songs accompanying the slightly fictionalized re-telling of the Manson family murders. If you ever wondered if somebody could do hardcore puppet sex in a less arousing way than Let My Puppets Come, here you go.

The Puppet Monster Massacre

Photo Credit: Dustin W. Mills

2010 horror spoof The Puppet Monster Massacre takes a weary horror premise and makes it marginally more interesting by having an all-puppet cast act it out. When a group of teens receive and offer to spend the night in a haunted mansion in exchange for a million dollars, it kicks off a series of grisly kills, explicit sex, and rabbit torture. The visual style of this one is interesting, combining traditional Muppet-style leads with CGI backgrounds. While ramshackle hand-made sets are one of our favorite things about puppet theater, we can’t deny that this works.

The Happytime Murders

Photo Credit: Hopper Stone / Motion Picture Artwork 2017 STX Financing, LLC.

Directed by Jim Henson’s son Brian, The Happytime Murders drew controversy before it was even released, with Sesame Workshop filing a suit against them for using the tagline “No Sesame, all Street.” The flick, which takes place in a world where humans and puppets co-exist and the latter are second-class citizens, follows a mixed pair of detectives as they try to solve a string of murders. While it isn’t as over-the-top grotesque as the movies that preceded it, there’s still plenty of adult themes at play here. Unfortunately, The Happytime Murders tanked both critically and commercially, making us worry for the future of dirty puppets.

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