On the Animality of Cookie Monster, Grover, Elmo, and Oscar the Grouch

Animality and Finitude #2

Whereas Bert and Ernie are human, Big Bird a canary, Snuffleupagus an elephantine beast, and Samson (for those in Deutschland) a bear, many creatures of Sesame Street defy categorization. Muppets of this latter sort, which include the four luffa-textured individuals to be dissected here, are neither human nor recognizably animal. In this zone of indistinction, they stand for animality itself. They represent the breakdown of human form into animal other.

Each of them is befurred with hair of an impossible color. None is clothed, a condition they share with the more categorizable Big Bird, Samson, and Snuffy, but which separates them primordially from Bert and Ernie. Each is bestowed with a certain naked personage and permission to live on Sesame Street even without having on the street a proper address of their own (ask yourself whether Oscar’s trash bin ought to count as his address). Let us examine each figure in turn.

1. Cookie Monster

Cookie, who in us elicits a response of frustration, has no intelligible voice and is driven purely by inclination, not by reason. If, in his frenzied search for or consumption of cookies, he should kill a human being, a human child let’s say—children often being placed in proximity to a monster of this sort—he would not be held responsible for this. He lacks reason in this sense. He is animality as madness, as before and beside the law, though he may once have been capable of sanity. One imagines Cookie as having once had a job and a family, as having worn a tie and bowler hat, punching his card each day down at the plant and returning to the patriarchal cave of home-cooked meal and slippers and newspaper. But then, somewhere along the way, his passion for cookies took over, developing within him a sickness of the understanding that would become all-consuming. He frustrates us since, when he is around, we cannot have anything nice, can have no cookies left out in the open. Better therefore to confine him than to allow him to roam free. Note that, whereas most other residents of Sesame Street are shown entering or exiting addressed or non-addressed dwelling-places of some sort—in each case housing bed or nest or heap of garbage to roost upon—it is never shown where Cookie lives, where he ought to live. One imagines him as escaped from the asylum, straight jacket still bundled around his waist, though it no longer confines his cookie-addled hands, over which his reason has no control.

2. Grover

Grover can at times pass as a legitimate human person. He sometimes wears hats and costumes. But his incompetence at all endeavors, his inability to take anything seriously or go about his work in an earnest, straightforward way, his general roughness at life is an animalized rawness (hence Grover becomes ‘Grobi’ in German adaption—meaning literally, ’Roughy’). Grover is unfinished and unrefined. Not because he is still working towards this but makes errors and adjustments along the way, having not yet got it right but moving in the right direction. Rather, he is unfinished because he is incapable of being finished. His existence can be defined, in the words of Immanuel Kant, as ‘a certain raw state in that the animal in this case has so to speak not yet developed the humanity inside itself.’

3. Elmo

Elmo is perhaps the most personable of the bunch. Hence he serves as show-host on his own sometimes (unimaginable for Cookie Monster). He can fill the shoes of protagonist, which must be terribly awkward for the others whenever it happens. His animalization is in the mode of the animal child. No one in their right mind would let Elmo drive a car or purchase a firearm. He has a certain innocence to him intrinsically. Elmo’s childishness is no developmental stage, but rather his underlying existential structure. Elmo is child eternal, fated ever to be a person in the making, a certain sickly sweet and coy striving towards or approximation of personhood, but never a person in the proper sense. With Elmo one can laugh, tickle and be tickled, share a sentimental moment. But Elmo can never claim a seat at the big kids’ table, at the poker game, at the round of Russian roulette, at the cocktail party where, definitionally, only adults, only full persons, are allowed.

4. Oscar the Grouch

Finally, Oscar’s animality is particularly twisted and bent back in on itself. For it manifests not in pure inclination as in Cookie, but in pure abjection—the abjection that belongs to all animals, that accompanies animality itself. One has the sense that, deep inside, Oscar is actually a good, loving guy—a troll with the heart of a grinch: presently two sizes too small but capable of becoming three times larger. And yet, despite this sense, we accept his abjection as something fated, something that suits him, something he deserves. Even his character-defining grouchyness is true to his animal form. This may be taken as evidence of his resentment of the others or of the world at large, but it just as much reveals his resignation to the gravity of it all—his realization that, though he live in a trash can and swim in refuse (it would be very different if he were a hermit in a cave, or a wanderer of the forest beyond Sesame Street, a sort of chipped-shoulder Lorax), this is the place that society offers him, and it is the place he ought to remain. Hence, though Oscar be grouchy, his rumblings are never registered as protests against his abjection, can never penetrate city hall or the Sesame Street residents’ council as complaints to be heard and, if resources might permit, remedied. Oskar is animalized in his tragedy. His condition is that of the sad orang-utan in the zoo, or of the crying, unshaven middle-aged man whose ice cream scoop has fallen out of the cone and onto the sidewalk below.

One can associate with such liminal beings, can even at times befriend them. But they can never become a true part of one’s family. They are each orphaned in their animality. They scuffle the pavement of Sesame Street as strange objects, not just of amusement and education, but of pity, contempt, alterity, and disgust.

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This post is a Philosophy Drop—a bitesized philoso-morsel destined to coalesce with other drops in one of several larger philoso-pools. In this case, the drop feeds into the book-in-progress Animality and Finitude.