“You’re working directly next to a performer with years of experience.
“It’s a great training ground,” Dillon says. The newcomer will manipulate the right, a duty informally known as right handing. Throughout that training, he accompanied the main puppeteer, who uses their dominant (usually right) hand to control the mouth and the other to control the left hand. He performed as a right hand and as various supporting characters for years before scoring the Elmo role in 2013. “Some characters, like Cookie Monster, require two performers with two practical hands.”ĭillon started working on Sesame Street in 2005 at the age of 17. “A lot of performers will almost only do right hands for a very long time,” Ryan Dillon, the puppeteer behind Elmo, tells Mental Floss. Though there’s no definitive set of directions for puppeteers to get to Sesame Street, a number of performers selected to work on the show begin as apprentices with one specific task: operating the right hand of characters alongside the veteran cast members. Sesame Street puppeteers usually get started lending a (right) hand.
Here’s what they had to say about crossed puppet eyes, grooming habits, and enjoying a long career finessing felt. To get a better sense of what goes into this unique skill set, Mental Floss spoke with three veteran Sesame Street performers. But behind every memorable character is a human performer, one tasked with juggling the technical demands of puppet operation without losing the humor and heart that makes their furry counterpart so memorable. The Sesame characters-Big Bird, Elmo, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, the Count, and others-have become instantly recognizable to generations of viewers. For more than 50 years, Sesame Street has been imparting valuable moral, ethical, and social lessons to young audiences using a sprawling cast of puppets.
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