Naughty Puppets On Broadway

On Avenue Q, puppets and humans of all shapes and races intermingle in a fictional New York neighborhood. The setup may sound like Sesame Street, but it's really just steps away from South Park.

By Katie Riegel, published on September 01, 2003

One look at Lucy T. Slut, the navel-pierced puppet star of Broadway's newest musical, lets theatergoers know that sweet, naive Big Bird won't be coming to visit.

Welcome to Avenue Q, where puppets and humans of all shapes and races intermingle in a fictional New York neighborhood. The setup may sound like Sesame Street, but it's really just steps away from South Park. Puppets in the show drink and curse, engage in loud onstage sex and surf the web for porn.

Like South Park and its cultural cousins The Simpsons and Crank Yankers, Avenue Q gets its comic blast from pairing the familiar formulas of children's entertainment with the raunchy language of adulthood.

Audiences can't get enough: The production's award-winning off-Broadway run sold out, earning it a bump-up to Broadway.

Why is it so funny to dirty up kids' stuff? The show tackles touchy themes through the distancing medium of puppetry, so people are much more likely to laugh than to become offended, says Stuart Fischoff, a professor of media psychology at the Fielding Institute in California.

Fischoff adds that music can also help numb the normal triggers of offense: "If the music and lyrics are catchy, you will find people who wouldn't normally be receptive to the song's message singing along and subconsciously hearing it."

"Your mind is telling you two different things," concurs Avenue Q composer/lyricist Robert Lopez. "You know the puppet's not alive but it's singing and looking at you, which makes people nervous. When people get nervous, they laugh."