Remember When the Muppets Were Subversive?

At the beginning of August, the foam puppets Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy announced on Twitter that they had broken up. This week, an apparently human source told People that Kermit had a new girlfriend, named Denise, who, like his ex, is also a foam-puppet pig, but with almond-shaped eyes and a delicate snout. A bit later, Kermit issued a statement, again on Twitter, saying that he and Denise were not dating but were “simply close friends.” Each of these announcements generated the kinds of urgent opinions on social media that are normally reserved for the comings and goings of actual flesh-and-bone celebrities. “The most common comment people make [is] that Kermit and all the other Muppets seem to be real people,” Jim Henson, the late master of the Muppets universe, said in 1977, according to Bryan Jay Jones’s biography. That’s still true, nearly forty years later.