Today’s ToughPigs article was written by guest writer Adam Z. – co-host of the ToughPigs podcast Fraggle Talk: Classic! Many thanks to Adam for all of his continued hard work and Muppet diligence!
This article is part of an ongoing series, The ToughPigs Beacon. Click here to read additional installments!
I am watching Muppets from Space, and I am ugly crying.
***
I am at the Pick n Pull, helping an allistic friend find a new car seat. One of the workers directs us to the correct area of the lot. We find a seat that works, then head back to our car to get our tools. On the way back, we see the same worker, and I tell him excitedly, “We found one! We’re gonna go get our tools now.” He looks at me with confusion and does not respond. My allistic friend chuckles with appreciation and says, “Oh, you and your extra thorough communication.”
***
I am drinking with two friends, including that same allistic friend. The topic of his ability to perform A Certain Task comes up, and I say, “I don’t know if you can do that or not, I’ve just never seen you do it.” We argue, the kind of argument that I am so deeply used to: someone is angry at me and I am trying to understand why they are angry while also trying to explain myself. Eventually, the third friend steps in and we figure out that when I said, “I don’t know if you can do that or not, I’ve just never seen you do it,” what my allistic friend heard was “You can’t do that, I don’t believe you.”
This confuses me. I explain that I was just trying to speak precisely. To his credit, he chalks it up to a misunderstanding and we bury the hatchet.
***
I am in college. I have just had another friendship turn into someone who goes out of their way to be angry at me. I do not know why. I cannot pinpoint when this transitioned, only that someone who was happy to see me when we showed up to class now shoots glares at me whenever I speak. This has happened often enough that I am used to it.
I try to process by writing a song about an alien who has been sent on a scouting mission to earth but hates it and wants to go home to their home planet. The only line worth keeping is, “The translator you gave me only translates what they say/ not what they mean.”
***
I am hanging out with an autistic friend during the pandemic. This will be our first time hanging out in years, and my first time at her house. We spend the first fifteen minutes doing a brief tour of the house. We stand in each of the common rooms. She shows me where the fire extinguisher is and gives me a quick rundown of the first aid kit. We spend five minutes sharing our Covid precaution comfort levels and agree to sit across the room from each other with an open window between us, and a fan on medium power blowing out the open window.
Then we both relax completely and have one of the most enjoyable nourishing hangouts either of us had had since the plague. We part feeling serene and resourced.
***
I am staying with an autistic sweetie. We are eating two different desserts and watching cartoons. I realize we are close to finishing the desserts, and I pause and ask, “Which one of these do we want to be each of our Last Bites?”
My sweetie’s face lights up like a beacon. They beam and reply, “I love you, too.”
***
I am a teenager in a LARP group. The head of costuming lives in a huge old house. On weekends, we get stoned in her attic and pass the costumes around, sharing our favorite fabric textures. We share the aux cord, and each of listens completely to whatever song the other person has chosen to share, rocking back and forth and wiggling with joy
***
I am homeschooling a pod of autistic children. During free play, they invent a game that is a mix of algebra and hop-scotch. It has odd hyperspecific rules, geometric symbols, and a book of baby names. In addition to the chalk hopscotch path, they have drawn a legend on the brickwork so that all the symbols are clearly defined.
***
My autistic partner says something so sweet that I wiggle with happiness. She sees me wiggling and it makes her so happy that she wiggles too. We giggle and wiggle. It is like standing in the sun on a cold day.
***
I am watching the end of Muppets from Space, and I am ugly crying.
***
Gonzo was always my favorite Muppet. This is a common enough trait among neurodivergent folk that there are memes about it. I loved the way everything he tried to do went spectacularly wrong and he clearly had an amazing time doing it. I loved how he narrated Muppet Christmas Carol with informed context and genuine passion.
The first Muppet VHS I ever watched had 3 episodes, and there were three different bits with Gonzo trying to blow the trumpet at the end of the theme song. First it spouted water, then lit up like Christmas lights. The third time, it rang like a telephone, and Gonzo answered it, wandering offstage as he was immediately engrossed in conversation. With that, I was hooked.
All the other Muppets are animals. The cast has frogs, bears, shrimp, rats, and humans — and then there’s Gonzo. He’s… well… he’s Gonzo. He’s blue and has a weird elephant nose and no one seems to know what he is, including him.
That last bit, that’s important. Gonzo doesn’t know what he is. He’s just following his whims and doing his best to do stuff that makes him happy. Frogs have swamps, bears have Studebakers, Gonzo has nothing.
This difference extends past just his physical form. Gonzo is his own breed of weird and wild. He keeps a gaggle of chickens that he bickers with like an old married couple. He casually wonders how far you could fall from a hot air balloon before you passed out. And he is constantly concocting the wildest and most off-the-wall stunts.
Over the course of The Muppet Show, Gonzo attempts to do the following:
- Recite Shakespeare while dangling from his nose nine feet in the air
- Catch a cannonball with his bare hand
- Recite his seven times table while standing on a hammock and balancing a piano
- Yodeling while riding a motorized pogo stick
- Recite Percy Shelley while defusing a BOMB
- Launches himself from a catapult to sky-write the Hallelujah Chorus
- Launches a rocket while he is attached to it
His stunts are off the wall, incredibly dangerous, and often bring together several different aspects of performance that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Most importantly, he LOVES them. Gonzo has the most fun of any Muppet when he’s attempting some hare-brained death-defying wackiness.
The other Muppets don’t understand him. They comment on his strangeness often. Just as clearly, that doesn’t matter to them. They accept him. He’s family.
He’s just not like them, and it shows.
***
Most of Muppets from Space honestly isn’t even that good. It’s the standard “Is this real or is the main character imagining things” trope. Gonzo gets a message that his alien family is visiting earth. He tries to tell his Muppet family but there’s no proof. Every time there’s a new message, something wacky happens and the evidence gets destroyed.
It’s full of dated references to 90s shows and would probably be stronger at half the length. There are a few cute moments of domesticity as we see what it’s like to live in a big communal Muppet house, but on the whole, the movie’s beats are predictable and not very interesting.
The only compelling throughline is Gonzo’s genuine need for clarity. There’s a clear desperation, a genuine emotional vulnerability, this deep need to finally get some damn answers about who he is and where he comes from. It’s this need and not any physical evidence that leads his Muppet family to wait with him on a dark beach for the aliens to arrive.
They do. A ship touches down. It opens like a beautiful disco flower blooming to reveal a whole group of aliens who look just like Gonzo literally dancing with joy. I remember smiling, thinking, “Oh, that’s a sweet moment. Okay, this is a fine movie, now how are they gonna resolve this?”
Then the leader of these aliens announces that they are going to enact their “Most Ceremonious of Ceremonies.” They load Gonzo into a cannon and fire it straight up in the air. The camera cuts between the shocked and confused crowd and Gonzo rocketing into the sky, so full of joy he can’t stop laughing and yelling. And I cried so hard.
All these death-defying stunts, these wacky hijinks and wild extravagant acts – these are not just Gonzo being his own special kind of weird. This is his culture.
***
Imagine growing up and slowly realizing that everyone around you speaks a different language than you do. It’s confusing, because not only do these languages share an alphabet, they use the same words and phrases. Its extra confusing, because it seems like everyone is being taught the language you speak, but in practice they’re not speaking it at all.
Growing up autistic is feeling like the only second-language-learner in a world of native speakers. Growing up autistic is knowing that I will be alone in every room I walk into. Growing up autistic is knowing that even if I am accepted, I will never not be the weird one.
Imagine, after decades of that, hearing someone speak your language out of the corner of your ear. Imagine talking to them and slowly realizing that you don’t just share a language but cultural values. You are not weird. You are simply in a foreign land, and you have found your people.
***
I used to joke that I wasn’t a human, I was a Martian. As I have built more and more autistic community, I started to joke that I was creating the Martian Embassy on Earthling Soil. I still say that, and it doesn’t really feel like a joke anymore.
When I ask for clarification from my autistic friends, they don’t interpret it as undermining them. They simply give me context and we move on.
When I flap my hands around my autistic friends, they don’t wrinkle their nose at me. Many of them collect interesting fidgets and textures, and I am often handed a basked of things to explore to see if any of them are to my taste.
When I begin to excitedly gush about something I’ve been fascinated by, they don’t roll their eyes or ask me to tone it down. Their faces light up, and they ask followup questions and engage in the content. Then, when I’ve exhausted myself, they share what they’ve been focused on, and I get to learn all sorts of fascinating things.
This is our culture. These are our values. We value clear communication and honesty. We value passion over pleasantries. We curate our sensory experiences to maximize joy and minimize misery. This is who we are. We are not broken. We are not wrong. We are autistic.
***
I talk a lot about being autistic. Part of it is just my inability to shut up consistently, and part of it is because it’s fascinating to me. But there’s another reason. I know that being publicly autistic is a beacon. Every time someone asks to talk to me because they think they might be autistic, every time someone heart reacts one of my posts about autism moods,
I know that we are spreading the experience of belonging. Every single autistic person deserves a chance autistic community. We deserve to speak our native language together, to build autistic spaces so we can share autistic joy and grief.
I remember the ubiquitous inexorable isolation of being an autistic person in neurotypical society. I want to give every single autistic person experiencing that the overflowing joy of Gonzo being shot out of a cannon, hurtling through the air: not just accepted, but belonging.
Click here to relate to a hook-nosed weirdo on the ToughPigs Discord!
by Adam Z.
