From the mind of Brian Henson, son of the late Jim Henson, comes “The Happytime Murders,” a black comedy that promises to “reveal what goes down when kids aren’t around.” An intriguing premise to be sure, but the movie—with its excessive prurience and violence—fails to portray any semblance of what life is like for most adults.
Source: SVIATLANA ZYKAVA / 123RF Puppets behaving badly is a long-time trend, and despite the recent box-office and critical failure of “The Happytime Murders,” a trend that will likely endure. In 1989, for instance, Peter Jackson wrote, produced, and directed “Meet the Feebles,” another black comedy that like "The Happytime Murders" takes a closer look at the sleazier side of life using a comedy troupe of Hensonesque puppets. Other examples of puppets misbehaving include Comedy Central’s “Crank Yankers” from the early aughts, and more recently the foul-mouthed Jeffy, a helmet-wearing youngster with a pencil stuck up his nose.
Misbehaved puppets should probably remain adult fare. The reality, however, is that many kids end up seeing this stuff. How do children react to such media?
As far as I can tell, one study did look at children’s reactions to misbehaving puppets—in particular, violence among puppets. And although themes of a sexual nature and curse words abound in the “bad-puppet” subgenre, too, at least we can get some sense of how puppet violence affects kids.
In a 1979 study from the Journal of Social Psychology, Surbeck and Endsley examined verbal expressions of fear among children watching violent television shows involving human actors compared with those involving puppet characters.
In total, 64 American children (32 aged between 4 and 6 years; 32 aged between 8 and 11 years) were shown short episodes depicting violent acts involving either human actors or puppets.
Although the human violence was judged by children as being scarier than the puppet violence, girls in particular were scared by both. The researchers also found that heart rates dropped when children viewed puppet violence after seeing human violence episodes. Drops in heart rate were greatest during periods of greatest violence.
Importantly, verbal reassurance was effective in decreasing the fear elicited by both human and puppet actors in older children.
Though the study is far from new, it proffers certain insights that have held up well over the decades. For one, although kids are less moved by puppet violence than they are by human violence, they can still be emotionally impacted by it.
Secondly, in older children, verbal reassurance about what they just saw can be helpful. This can be a useful strategy for parents, but in the digital age, it’s challenging to monitor all of your children’s media consumption. Many parents are clueless as to what their kids watch and are unaware of the need to debrief.