An Interview with the Front Half of Mr. Snuffleupagus

In last week’s paper, I wrote about Puppet-o-Rama, a puppet festival at Seattle University. I wish I had three times the space in the paper to write about the festival—I had a really good time, and puppetry is a surprisingly compelling subject.

Part of what didn’t make it into the paper were the preparatory interviews I did before going to Puppet-o-Rama, and the most awesome of those interviews was with Michael Earl, who was the front half of Mr. Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street from 1978 to 1980. Earl was the first puppeteer hired sight unseen by Jim Henson, and he worked as an extra on The Muppet Movie before being hired full-time for Sesame Street, portraying characters like Snuffy,* Barkley the Dog, assorted Honkers, and Slimey the Worm, among others. At the time, the majority of the Muppet staff were in England, filming The Muppet Show, so Earl and one other man were responsible for almost all of Sesame Street‘s puppetry.

After a long career doing puppetry for film and PSA’s, Earl began teaching professional puppeteers how to do television puppetry. “It’s all done on monitors, so the image is backwards,” Earl explains. “It’s very confusing to the human brain—it’s not a mirror image. When you come in from the right, the puppet comes in from the left, it takes a couple of weeks for it to accept that.” Eventually, he says, “I kind of went through all the puppeteers in Los Angeles. I couldn’t find any more puppeteers. That’s when I started getting actors and mimes and dancers and voice-over people.” Professional actors are always eager to pick up another skill to make them more marketable—for example, though the original cast of Avenue Q were puppeteers, the new cast members are generally actors who learn puppetry specifically for the musical.

A little over a month ago, Earl decided to focus exclusively on teaching, and so he founded Puppet School. Puppet School is for puppeteers and actors, but Earl also teaches non-professional people who are interested in puppetry as a hobby (YouTube has become a hotbed of amateur puppetry). “The idea for Puppet School,” he says, “Is to teach the general public. Because I think if an actor can do it, the general public can do it.” So what is Puppet School like? “My class is much like a dance class. Or martial arts classes. [The students] are learning with their hands. There’s an ease, a fluidity, an athleticism with puppetry. It has to be strong and specific.”

Earl teaches classes in Seattle on a semi-regular basis. (He’s in talks to teach at Bellevue’s 3D Training Academy this fall.) If you’re interested, you can find more information here.

* He really does call him “Snuffy,” which is adorable.