2023-12-08 09:00:43
New York Years ago, a reader wrote to me looking for details about a mystery that had been bothering him: “What about the cookies that the Cookie Monster eats?” he asked. The email said nothing more. I laughed and filed the note away in the closet in my brain where these things go. Until I realized something: I want cookies. And I want answers.
For those of you who skipped childhood, the Cookie Monster is a Muppet, a classic puppet from Sesame Street. A blue being with round, wiggly eyeballs who has been singularly obsessed with chaotically eating cookies for decades. The crumbs end up almost everywhere except in its mouth, an effect that resembles that of a high-speed blender without a lid.
The character was created in the 1960s by Muppet creator Jim Henson for a General Foods Canada commercial. The Monster eventually moved to Sesame Street, where he presumably found a nice rent-stabilized apartment. And it turns out the cookies are real. Well, a little. They are cooked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a puppeteer for the Jim Henson Co. for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern at Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.
The recipe, broadly speaking, is a mixture of pancakes, puffed rice, grapes and instant coffee with water. Chocolate chips are made with hot glue sticks; they are basically blobs of colored glue. The cookies have no oils, fats or sugars because they would stain the Cookie Monster. They are edible, but barely. “It’s kind of like a dog cookie,” MacLean said in an interview. Before the puppeteer reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind Sesame Street he used versions of rice crackers made from foam. The challenge was overcoming the fact that the cookies crumpled and stuck to the Monster’s skin. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they were broken.
For a given episode – depending on the script – MacLean will bake, on average, two dozen cookies. There is no oven big enough in the studios of Sesame Street in New York, so MacLean does almost everything at home. This occasionally involves some awkward interaction, such as when MacLean had to make large batches of cookies for a parody series of Cookie Monster movies. “The owner of my apartment came over at the time. He had all these cookies around and I said, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t offer you a cookie,'” she explains. On set, when the Monster is rolling, MacLean says the “best case scenario” is that crumbs end up everywhere. Sal Pérez, executive producer of Sesame Streetadds: “You have to watch out for the shrapnel that comes out of his mouth when he’s biting into the cookie.”
The more wrinkles, the more fun
The Cookie Monster has been played since 2001 by David Rudman, who took over the role of Frank Oz. Rudman’s right hand moves his mouth, which he is eating, and his left hand holds the cookies. Both work together to make the cookies crisp, which means they have to be soft enough to break apart. Jason Weber, the series’ creative supervisor, recalls Rudman complaining one day about a particularly difficult batch: “My hands are so sore! Don’t you ever do that again,” he then begged. Rudman stresses that soft cookies are best, adding, “The crumblier, the more fun.”
“If you eat the cookie and it just breaks into two pieces, or if it’s too hard, it’s not fun,” he notes. “It seems almost painful. But when you eat a cookie and it explodes into a hundred crumbs, that’s where the comedy comes in,” says Rudman. MacLean has perfected a recipe that makes the cookie “thin enough that it explodes into a hundred crumbs, but not thin enough that it It broke my hand when I took it,” the performer emphasizes.
Sometimes shoots don’t go as planned. The Cookie Monster appeared on the late show Saturday Night Live in 2010, when Jeff Bridges was the host. During the opening monologue, Bridges sang a duet with the Monster. The cookie that Bridges was supposed to offer the puppet broke in the host’s pocket, so when he took it out, he only had half of it. Bridges pulled out the other piece and improvised. “Not just half, but a whole cookie!” said the presenter. Rudman replied like a happy Monster: “Twice as good!”
But the Monster doesn’t just eat cookies. He also gobbles up the plate of sweets and has recently expanded his menu to include fruits and vegetables. Occasionally devours inanimate objects, including mailboxes. It has a small esophagus in its mouth, so it can swallow items the size of a small fist. Bananas, apples, and small hats easily fall down her throat, but most cookie crumbs end up outside her mouth.
Not everyone realizes that cookies are not edible. Adam Sandler appeared in a 2009 episode of Sesame Street and decided to share the Monster’s pleasure by spontaneously eating a cookie with him on set. “As soon as the cameras went off, he spat,” MacLean recalls. Rudman said he had warned Sandler not to eat the cookies: “I think he got carried away in the moment.”
It’s hard not to. Season 54 of Sesame Street it has just been released in the United States, through Max, although there is still no date to see it in Catalonia. The Monster is almost 60 years old, but the essence of his character lives on. “It has a kind of basic instinct that I think we all share, even the youngest – says Pérez -. One of our first instincts is that when we see a cookie, or when we see something we love, we just want it” .
Copyright The New York Times
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