We took a show to the Aspen Comedy Festival, called “Puppet Up” at that point, and in Aspen we just did three shows, and in Aspen, there was a producer from the Edinborough Fringe Festival, who said, “Please come to Edinborough.”
BRIAN HENSONI think it’s a lot richer than what we call fleshy improv, I think it’s very funny, puppet improv and fleshy improv.
More Brian Henson Quotes
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We try to keep it a classy show, but it certainly is blue at times. And it all depends on the audience, sometimes we’ve have audiences that don’t really want us to go too far in that direction.
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We wanted to premiere it in New York, because New York is sort of the home of the Jim Henson Company and it’s sort of the tone and flavor, always, of the puppet work that we’ve done traditionally. And that’s what brought us here and now we’re here.
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And with puppets, especially in our company, we sort of demand a very high standard of puppetry, so it’s a real technical skill.
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But curriculum-wise, I was drawn to the sciences and specifically to physics, and I really enjoyed it and I think for a little while there, I was really thinking my schooling would be in physics, that that was something I loved.
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So while you’re trying to improvise, you’re also trying to puppeteer, you’re doing everything that you need to do to perform a puppet in our style, for a camera.
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So it’s Rosemary Clooney – Rosemary? Rosemary Clooney, right? The singer? Yes. Clooney, doing, singing. “
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I’m doing something that’s quite precise over here, working the puppet, and I’m doing something that’s very imprecise and creative and unleashed over here, which is the comedy side. And it’s kind of nice to allow your brain to be doing those two things at once.
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And it should be something that only that group of people could’ve made with everybody invested.
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There’s an awful lot of scenes where we don’t know what the scene’s going to be about, we ask the audience, pick a place that the scene is happening, pick the relationship, tell us who they are, things like that.
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My dad and mom were, they would take what were popular hits, and lip-sync to them with puppets and do a ridiculous story.
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I have nothing really prepared,” and actually I say that, the show is not all improvising.
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Oh, well, I can’t tell you; it would be telling you the end. It’s a one-character lip-syncing because in the early days, that’s what my dad was doing.
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I think it’s a lot richer than what we call fleshy improv, I think it’s very funny, puppet improv and fleshy improv.
BRIAN HENSON -
And if the audience is in a kind of naughty, raunchy mood, then they’re going to make naughty, raunchy suggestions and then we take them and we do the scene anyway, and that’s part of the fun.
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I try to emulate his approach of really get the most out of people by allowing them to experiment and certainly allowing people to make mistakes.
BRIAN HENSON