Steve Martin Really Wanted the Muppets to Like Him

Long before he was solving murders in luxury apartment buildings and endlessly trading pre-written put-downs with Martin Short, Steve Martin collaborated with those hunks of felt and plastic that made our childhoods magical (and early 2000s Denny’s commercials real weird): the Muppets.

Martin was one of the earliest hosts of The Muppet Show, appearing in a Season Two episode back in 1977. Martin’s hosting duties found him juggling, making balloon animals and, of course, wailing on the banjo. 

Just two years later, the comedy superstar was invited to cameo in the Jim Henson creations’ big-screen debut, The Muppet Movie. Martin played the snarky restaurant server who waits on Kermit and Miss Piggy while wearing short shorts that leave little to the imagination. 

Martin would go on to appear in several movies directed by Muppet performer Frank Oz, including Little Shop of Horrors, Housesitter, Bowfinger and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Oz is currently being honored with a retrospective of his work at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. One recent screening of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels included a Q&A with Oz and Martin, which found the Three Amigos star admitting that he was surprisingly intimidated by his puppet co-stars. 

After watching a clip of his Muppet Movie performance, Martin told the crowd, “The strangest thing is, when I did that scene, and did The Muppet Show, is that you have this weird thing that you want them to like you.”

Martin went on to explain that the characters “become kind of real and you want to have a real relationship with them. Just for the show, and for yourself, because you’ve always liked them,” adding that he literally thought to himself, “I hope Kermit likes me.”

While Oz had no idea that Martin felt that way at the time, it’s certainly not uncommon for actors to treat the Muppets as living entities, not puppets. Muppeteer John Tartaglia once claimed that “people forget all the time that there’s somebody inside of these characters, when you don’t see us.” That said, this was in response to a slightly less sweet Muppet encounter: Larry David’s random assault on Elmo.

Martin did note that he wasn’t the only one to treat the Muppets with reverence. When he first started going out for lunch with Oz in the ‘80s, he noticed that younger servers would have an involuntary, borderline profound reaction after unconsciously recognizing the man who voiced Miss Piggy, Bert, Grover, Fozzie Bear and Cookie Monster, just to name a few. “Frank would order, and you’d see their face kind of go back somewhere in their soul,” Martin recalled. “They know that voice, somehow, and it’s so important to them. It’s almost like they’re having a religious experience, and they can’t figure out why. It took me a while to figure out, ‘Oh, they’re recognizing your voice somehow.’” 

Presumably, The Jerk and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band didn’t have quite the same effect on people’s early childhoods.