Q Toon: The Importance of Bert and Ernie

This keeps coming up again and again, but I couldn't leave alone the latest report that a former writer for Sesame Street says he based Bert and Ernie scripts on his and his life partner's relationship.

So I don’t think I’d know how else to write them, but as a loving couple. I wrote sketches…Arnie’s OCD would create friction with how chaotic I was. And that’s the Bert & Ernie dynamic. ... How could it not permeate? The things that would tick off Arnie would be the things that would tick off Bert. How could it not?

The folks at Children's Television Workshop have protested that Bert and Ernie have no sexual orientation, because they're puppets. They just happen to have framed portraits of themselves in every room of their apartment.

It's not like they're Teletubbies, after all.

As I was hashing out this cartoon idea, the first decision came down to whether I would make reference to the 1968 Walter Matthau-Jack Lemmon movie version of the Neil Simon play, or the Jack Klugman-Tony Randall television show that ran from 1970 to 1975.

Only the next morning, after I had sent the cartoon off to my syndicate editors did I remember that there was a 2015-17 TV remake starring Matthew Perry (Friends) and Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!).  And until I went to look up Lennon's name a moment ago, I had completely forgotten that there was a 1982 TV version starring Ron Glass (WKRP in Cincinnati) and Desmond Morris (Sanford & Son), and even a 1998 Odd Couple II with Matthau and Lemmon.

None of those other versions used the voice-over explanation of the premise given in the opening credits of the '70s TV show, so I suppose the scene parodied in the cartoon is lost on a whole lot of readers.

As Freud once said, sometimes a cigar is just a rubber duckie.

The character of Felix Unger emits something of a gay vibe in most of Odd Couple's iterations, even though Neil Simon didn't conceive of him that way, and in spite of all the TV episodes in which Felix tries to date women even though he still pines for his ex-wife. A few years ago, we went to see a Milwaukee production of the play starring a local out gay celebrity, and I was a little surprised to see him in the Oscar Madison role. (But yes, some of us gays can be slobs, too, you know.)

Meanwhile, what's this thing going on between Rocky and Bulwinkle?