Crude puppets can be funny, but most videos with them aren’t. Why is that?

I think one of the reasons is that a lot of people making videos on the web with puppets cursing and swearing think that just the idea of a profane puppet is a great joke. While that might have been the case back in 1989 when Peter Jackson made Meet The Feebles, the novelty has long since worn off. I don’t mean to suggest that puppets and profanity can’t work, just that in order for it to be funny there has to be something more substantial to it.

The media often attributes the success of a show like South Park to crudeness, but if you watch the show carefully you realize that the crudeness is really just window-dressing on some very clever comedy. South Park may feature talking pooh, a gay Satan and lots of little kids cursing and swearing, but it’s also an incredibly sharp satire of American society. Most episodes are filled with lots of very intelligent ideas that are also really, really funny.

I’ve read that many great comedians like Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld have a theory that comedy works better without profanity. The theory goes that people tend to use profanity as a crutch in comedy so by deliberately not using it you’re forced to come up with better ideas and write stronger material. This is important because people don’t laugh at swearing or even at jokes. People laugh at the funny idea behind a joke. You can tell a joke that involves sex or swearing, but it’s the idea that always gets the laugh, not the profanity. In puppetry, if you’re going to use profanity it should be the punctuation mark on a really good joke and not the joke itself. Otherwise your work isn’t funny, it’s just crude.

BTW this isn’t intended to be a jab at any particular person or video, just written in frustration after wasting time watching what seems like the umpteenth zillionth unfunny video on YouTube of puppets using the F-word.