My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [13]
In the years to come, that crazy little dog would make us laugh as much as any comedian, but in that moment, it was my father who delivered the joy.
ELMO’S LAUGH, AS infectious as it is frequent, is an important part of his personality, and it’s part of mine as well. When I feel happy, I often punctuate the ends of my sentences with laughter, just like Elmo, and I can think of no better expression of our joy than the uniquely human act of laughter. But unlike me, and like most three-and-a-half-year-olds, Elmo has almost no inhibitions about laughing. He never worries about what others may think.
Have you ever noticed how a lot of adults and even some kids, as they get older, look around when they’re laughing and cover their mouths as if there’s something wrong with it? Does being around somebody who has a great guffaw or a silly snort of a laugh make you uncomfortable, or do you want to join in?
You will never see Elmo hold himself back from laughing when he feels joy, though he is always careful never to laugh at someone. Elmo knows that sometimes laughter can be the cause of hurt feelings.
Elmo’s laughter is an expression of pure pleasure and enjoyment. No matter how my day is going, when Elmo starts to laugh, I feel it, too. When I’m performing, I wear a headband with a microphone attached to it and I sit on a low-slung, wheeled platform, with Elmo on one arm that I extend over my head. It’s a physically demanding position that must be maintained for long periods of time. I’m also watching along on a monitor; we use monitors to make sure that we are keeping the Muppets in the frame and that they are looking where they should be—at other characters, directly at the camera, or wherever their attention should be focused.
Despite the physical and mental concentration it takes to perform Elmo, his humor and sense of fun always get the better of me. Colleagues and friends who know what my real voice sounds like have told me that after Elmo does a bit and laughs, they can hear my laugh mixed in, reacting to what I’ve just seen on the monitor. His joy is that contagious.
His trademark laugh nearly didn’t survive the evolution of his character. Before Elmo and I “met” on that day in 1985, he wasn’t known for his laugh—he was known as a bit player on Sesame Street, a little monster who appeared infrequently and said “Yes, yes, yes!” in a boisterous child’s voice, over and over again. No one is exactly sure of when or precisely how Elmo arrived on the set, but Jim Hensen wanted his world to be filled with creatures of all types and colors and, oddly enough, there wasn’t a red monster. And we couldn’t very well reflect the diversity of the Muppet world without a red monster, given that we had green, yellow, purple, and even blue monsters with googly eyes.
Elmo—who got that name early on, though he was more commonly referred to on the set as “baby monster”—was first performed by different puppeteers, including Brian Meehl, whose regular characters included Telly and Barkley. After Brian left Sesame Street, the little red monster was stored away in the Muppet Workshop (where the puppets were built). David Korr, a writer who was noodling around and looking for inspiration, came across him and was smitten. David began writing Elmo into various scenes, with Richard Hunt performing. It was Richard who had Elmo saying “Yes, yes, yes!”—until he became so busy with other duties that he said “No, no, no” to Elmo and tossed him my way.
My introduction to Elmo occurred at the tail end of taping for the 1985 season, and I’d performed him, complete with his new laugh, only a few times before we went on hiatus for the summer. I had a few months to think about who this new character would become and what his personality would be like.