How Grover Made Me a Better Father

On one of our bookshelves here at Chez Gross sits an aging Muppet. He’s bluish and fuzzy, with a silver helmet, a pink nose, and a cape to match. He is—Super Grover! The greatest Muppet in the universe, and since today is, according to John Scalzi, International Grover Appreciation Day, I’d like to tell you all how he made me a better father.

Now, Grover may not seem like much of a role model for dads. He is famously inept: a poor waiter, a crummy baker, a superhero who can’t fly (or really, can’t land), a calamitous wig salesman. Wherever you meet this guy, something always goes wrong.

And yet Grover understands comedy better than any other felt-covered puppet. It’s not just because he introduces preschoolers to the Jewish tradition of the schlemiel and the schlamazel, the most important advance since the Greeks came up with the eiron and the alazon. (Grover is a textbook schlemiel: the waiter who inevitably dumps soup in the customer’s lap.)

To watch Grover is to see a master at work. After forcing a fake mullet on his bald, blue-faced nemesis, he asks the irate schlemazel, in his not-quite-smart-alecky lilt, “Are you saying you do not like it, my little butterfly?” Working in a bakery, he insists Fat Blue—the only customer—take a number before being served; Fat Blue gets 40, and Grover counts all the way up to it from 1 as his customer shakes with rage.

• Grover: “Do you have number 12, sir?”
• Fat Blue: “No.”
• Grover: “Then please be quiet.”

Finally, at 39, in walks a schoolteacher with the number 39—and 120 students for whom she needs to order doughnuts. Fat Blue collapses, and Grover, acting as if nothing has happened, takes the order. His commitment to the routine is total. There’s no trace of ironic detachment or delivery in the performance—he’s like Fred Armisen, almost—except that somewhere under it all, you suspect he knows exactly what’s going on.

What does this have to do with fatherhood? Well, it gives me a model for interacting with my own daughter: Be willing to take any joke to its literal extremes, play your role uncomplainingly, and when you fall down, out of the sky, and land in a heap on the ground, get right back up and do it again.

Just watch this video, in which Grover explains the concepts of “near” and “far,” and tell me that isn’t a dad playing with his kid. You can almost hear the toddler giggling in the background.