Miss Piggy Is Our Final Film Star

I’m a blonde due to three ladies: my mom, Lil’ Kim, and Miss Piggy. The final particularly has formed my understanding of womanhood and its prospects since I used to be a baby within the ’90s; each vacation season, I admired her aggressive and warranted demeanor as our dwelling wore out the VHS tape of The Muppet Christmas Carol. I’m not alone in my estimation of Miss Piggy.

“For me, rising up, there was a girl who I simply associated to. She simply felt very sturdy. She had a extremely particular POV. She requested for what she needed. She all the time had good jokes. And that lady was Miss Piggy,” Amy Poehler stated final spring on an episode of Las Culturistas. Her remark was met with shrieks from Bowen Yang and reward from Matt Rogers. After Tim Curry’s loss of life this week, a clip of the actor speaking about his affair with Miss Piggy on the set of Muppet Treasure Island started to flow into: “When you’ve had pork, you by no means return.” On Poehler’s personal podcast this 12 months, the actress Da’Vine Pleasure Randolph stated, “That woman, I’m who I’m right this moment due to her. At a younger age, that being instilled in you: You don’t take shit from males. You do your factor. Be fabulous.” She added, “That’s my girrrlll.” Throughout Sabrina Carpenter’s Quick n’ Candy tour, Miss Piggy made a cameo because the superstar who acquired “arrested” in the course of the singer’s final present. The gang’s response was uproarious. Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone are spearheading a brand new Miss Piggy–targeted film, set to be written by Cole Escola. When requested by W journal earlier this 12 months if she can be taking part in the diva, Stone scoffed in disbelief: “To begin with, that’s the largest insult to Miss Piggy I’ve ever heard, and I can’t have her identify dragged by way of the mud, I’m sorry. Why would I play a literal star?” She continued, “After all I’m not taking part in Miss Piggy … Miss Piggy is taking part in Miss Piggy.” Who else might?

To say Miss Piggy is having a second can be inaccurate. For the reason that mid-Nineteen Seventies, she’s been a cultural icon, bridging the hole between comedy and the world of style. She’s been dressed by Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Vivienne Westwood, and Zac Posen, amongst others. She has reported from New 12 months’s Eve ceremonies and written a best-selling ebook. She’s appeared on the covers of Elle, Life, and even New York in 2011. However Miss Piggy is the final lady film star. She is a part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, rigorously curated personas bolstered each by their market worth on the field workplace and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that find yourself on the silver display. These are ladies like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West. Throughout their reign in Hollywood’s Golden Age, their lives and cinematic work performed out beliefs about femininity and its expectations in American tradition writ giant. It’s a legacy Miss Piggy carries on.

Miss Piggy has spent the previous 5 a long time constructing a picture of pleasant contradictions: She’s glamorous and insecure, daring and susceptible, domineering and excessive femme. Whether or not sparring with Joan Rivers on Vogue Police in 2012 whereas sporting Louboutins (“Please, Joan, have some dignity. Or did it get sucked out the final time you had lipo?”); craving for love along with her on-again, off-again beau, Kermit the Frog; or asking Carpenter if she’s sporting her wig in The Muppet Present 2026 particular, Miss Piggy has made these contradictions into excessive comedic artwork.

Her presence is an argument: A lady could make herself into her best inventive work. Being filled with your self isn’t detrimental however obligatory for survival. Humor is a way of self-definition. Throughout the oeuvre of the Muppets’ cinematic and televisual work, Miss Piggy hasn’t ever wholly been a punch line — her picture is simply too dexterous for that. However points of her persona have been. Contemplate the 1982 tune “Snackcercise,” featured on Miss Piggy’s Aerobique Train Exercise Album. Within the video, dressed within the exercise gear du jour, Miss Piggy lounges whereas dancers flank her. “I keep my dynamite determine with a each day aérobique exercise,” she explains. “Now you go to your fridge and get your train tools and prepare to snackcercise.” Exercise strikes like “banana splits” advise one to “raise the dish, seize the spoon, take a chunk and chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow.” Her weight and notable urge for food are integral to the musical quantity. However one thing has shifted inside this decade. The Miss Piggy attributes that had been as soon as gags at the moment are the very points of her character that millennials (and, to a lesser extent, youthful Gen-Xers) deify her for.

One of many earliest incarnations of Miss Piggy was an unnamed, blonde, beady-eyed puppet in 1975’s The Muppet Present: Intercourse and Violence who spoke in a nasally whine throughout a movie parody, “Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs.” By the point The Muppet Present premiered the subsequent 12 months, Miss Piggy was reborn. She was given a particular look by designer Bonnie Erickson: a flowing robe, satin opera gloves, and huge light-blue eyes framed by thick eyelashes. She is without doubt one of the few Muppets with irises, which go a good distance towards making her appear human. And because of her puppeteer Frank Oz, who carried out the character from early in her historical past till the start of the aughts, her extremely romantic and vivacious persona got here to life. What’s fascinating about Miss Piggy’s journey from refrain woman in 1976 to Muppets star is how rapidly her persona coalesced as soon as Jim Henson & Co. noticed her potential.

Within the 1979 New York Instances article “The Muppets in Movieland,” pegged to the then-upcoming fourth season of The Muppet Present, Oz shares her origin story: Miss Piggy “grew up in a small city; her father died when she was younger; her mom wasn’t that good to her. She needed to enter magnificence contests to outlive. She has a variety of aggressiveness, however she wants rather a lot to outlive — as many single ladies do. She has a variety of vulnerability, which she has to cover, due to her have to be a celebrity.” All her fabulousness comes with a present of complication and sorrow: “Though Miss Piggy’s basically humorous, to me she’s had a tragic, troublesome, painful life,” Oz says. On a category degree, Miss Piggy is a striver, a self-made lady who acts as an argument for the ability of self-determination.

Within the 1981 movie The Nice Muppet Caper, we see this self-determination in motion. Haughty designer Woman Vacation (Diana Rigg) is speaking in regards to the failure of current designs: “We now have to make drastic adjustments within the new line earlier than the present tomorrow. All my women are going round wanting like barnyard animals.” Off-camera, somebody clears their throat.

“Good heavens, who’re you?” asks Woman Vacation. That somebody is Miss Piggy. Blonde hair flowing. Pearls gleaming. She casts a saucy gaze from beneath a white hat with pink florals. Her costume is white, magenta, and burgundy, matching her hat. She poses, leaning in opposition to the door. “My identify is Miss Piggy, and I want to be a high-fashion mannequin.”

“Doesn’t shock me. Appears to be the best way we’re heading,” Woman Vacation volleys, however Miss Piggy is undeterred.

“I’ve all the time dreamed of being a Vacation mannequin,” she says. “Might I are available?”

“Completely not.”

Miss Piggy is available in anyway. She virtually hops across the desk.

“Might I present you my portfolio?”

“No.”

Miss Piggy plops her black-cover portfolio on the desk: “Good. Right here.” Noticing Woman Vacation’s trepidation, Miss Piggy says, “You might open it.” Woman Vacation listlessly turns the pages, barely glancing at Miss Piggy in numerous outfits.

“That is me reeking grandeur. Being aloof. Being demure,” Miss Piggy narrates. “Ah” — her voice drops a number of octaves from its typical prissy, preening softness — “Daring.” Whereas the garments change, her pose and expression stay the identical.

“Fascinating vary of feelings,” Woman Vacation says sarcastically.

Miss Piggy is as assured as ever: “Modeling is my life. It’s my future. I shall settle for nothing much less.” She will get a job as a receptionist and screams with pleasure on the prospect. One step nearer to her objective of stardom.

Oz as soon as stated his means of understanding Miss Piggy was she’s a “truck driver eager to be a girl.” These rough-hewn points of Miss Piggy’s femininity really feel incongruous provided that you imagine a girl’s pure state is to be coy and demure, that issues occur to you however you by no means drive the motion. It’s the best way Miss Piggy renders her femininity as an arch spectacle, twisting expectations by incorporating notes culturally related to the masculine, that makes her a star. A film star isn’t merely a title bestowed upon these whose box-office numbers again it up. A star impacts the studying of a movie as a lot because the cinematography, path, and costume design. And a real one turns their contradictions right into a cohesive artwork kind.

Miss Piggy’s best ancestor on this regard is Mae West. With a profession spanning seven a long time, beginning in vaudeville earlier than turning towards pre–Hays Code Hollywood, West established her stardom her personal rattling self as an actress, comic, screenwriter, and playwright. Her first lead function on Broadway was within the 1926 play Intercourse, which she additionally wrote. Her work was so incendiary she was arrested for it. She battled censorship onstage and onscreen to discover sexuality and femininity in all its colourful, bawdy permutations. She appreciated her necklines low and robes tight on her Rubenesque body. F. Scott Fitzgerald is claimed to have deemed her the “solely Hollywood actress with each an ironic edge and a comic book spark.” I’m a fan of how West herself put it: “It isn’t what I do however how I do it. It isn’t what I say however how I say it. And the way I look after I do it and say it.”

It could be straightforward to cease on the superficial similarities between these outsize characters: blonde, petite in top however full-figured, outlined by their appetites. However Miss Piggy and Mae West share an fascinating stress: West was impressed by feminine impersonators, together with Bert Savoy, who was a determine in The Greenwich Village Follies, a musical revue from 1919 by way of the Twenties. She plucked inspiration from his campy extra for her signature strut. Within the Nineteen Thirties, West was concurrently deemed the “Siren of Intercourse and Sensation” and, by a author in Vainness Honest, “the best feminine impersonator of all time.” It’s femininity by way of the wanting glass. Miss Piggy, too, is the product of feminine impersonators. There’s a friction between the earnestness of the character, her reducing humor, her radical femininity, and the truth that solely males have carried out her: first Oz after which, after he principally stepped away from his work with the Muppets in 2001, Eric Jacobson, who has carried out her ever since.

Jacobson is a 55-year-old with a mild countenance who has been along with his spouse since they met when she was a manufacturing assistant on Sesame Avenue. He wasn’t initially a Miss Piggy acolyte. “I didn’t develop up with Miss Piggy as my favourite character from the Muppets,” he tells me. “I used to be extra of a Kermit man. Extra of a Fozzie Bear man. As a baby, I used to be drawn to characters that I assumed I may very well be mates with or that I needed to be like. And Miss Piggy, she was just a bit an excessive amount of for me.” It was solely over time, as he matured as a human being and performer, that he turned enamored: “I noticed all of the fascinating complexities to the character and have become an enormous fan of hers.”

Jacobson does a variety of improv as Miss Piggy — and he’s particularly in a position to minimize free on reside tv and in different less-scripted appearances. (Leigh Slaughter, vice-president of the Muppets Studio, famous that for the performers, scripts are generally extra ideas than rule of legislation.) It’s throughout Jacobson’s tenure that Miss Piggy’s picture has turn out to be an emblem of empowerment and prowess for her ladies and queer audiences, though prior viewers had been beginning to glean the nuances of the character. In her 1995 ebook, The Unruly Girl: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes, “In Miss Piggy’s Information to Life, a mock self-help and etiquette ebook, Miss Piggy borrows Cosmopolitan journal’s fashion of utilizing imperatives and checklists (‘do that, test that’) to inform ladies easy methods to enhance themselves. On the floor, she appears to simply accept the norms of femininity. However when she tells ladies how they will ‘snack’ their technique to ‘slimness,’ she abandons Cosmo’s line on deferred gratification in favor of the pleasure precept, mocking the bourgeois Protestant ethic of labor and funding that pervades ladies’s magazines and that helps assist the identification of self-sacrifice and masochism with femininity.”

In 2015, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Middle for Feminist Artwork on the Brooklyn Museum introduced Miss Piggy with a Sackler Middle First Award. The ceremony may be discovered on YouTube and contains Gloria Steinem lavishing the character with reward. Jacobson was initially proof against the award: “I assumed, Absolutely there should be any variety of precise ladies on the market who can be extra deserving of a feminist award than a fictional character — and, on prime of that, one who’s carried out by a person.” However Jacobson got here round. He says ladies got here as much as him to inform him how deeply Miss Piggy impressed them. “And that’s after I realized, Wow, this character is a lot greater than only a character — and simply how vital symbols may be to a society.”

The general public notion of Miss Piggy has continued altering; she’s turn out to be a signifier of confidence quite than feminine delusion. The artisans and producers on the Muppets Studio are nicely conscious of this truth. “Miss Piggy’s delusions of grandeur have been considerably accepted and even strengthened by the media and by completely different individuals. It’s turn out to be extra of a problem to play her as delusional, which is a extremely vital facet to her character. So many individuals now have purchased into her delusions: that she’s a giant star and a real expertise,” Jacobson says. It has led to a problem for him and the bevy of people that carry her to life. “We now have to search out new methods to make her much more excessive,” he says. “It’s enjoyable as a result of it simply pushes us to be extra absurdist. And that’s a part of the DNA of the Muppets.” It additionally comes by way of in what she wears and the way she carries herself. “We wish to say ‘These pearls usually are not actual,’” Dani Iglesias, the Muppets Studio inventive director, tells me. “She would by no means let anybody know that. Nevertheless it’s that sense of showmanship, of eager to challenge the thought of what it’s to be a diva and a profitable actress and fashionista that drives a variety of the choices we make for her wardrobe. There’s that Coco Chanel saying of ‘Dress after which take one accent off.’ Miss Piggy is the alternative, and she or he would put three extra on.”

Miss Piggy’s affect thrives within the current by way of characters like Cole Escola’s Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary! There’s a glint of Miss Piggy’s fast wit within the comedic edge and blonde ambitions of Jennifer Coolidge. I additionally see Miss Piggy in Jennifer Tilly. Whether or not stunting on The Actual Housewives of Beverly Hills or embodying the homicidal intercourse image Tiffany Valentine within the Chucky franchise, Tilly is a distinctively voiced, exceedingly enticing illustration of what confidence can get a girl who strives to maneuver past her fraught beginnings. However not like these flesh-and-blood examples, Miss Piggy doesn’t expertise the discrimination of getting older. She’s seasoned, sure. (I’ve all the time felt she’s in her mid-to-late 40s.) However she’s additionally ageless. If a girl star lives lengthy sufficient, she could get fortunate, like Barbra Streisand and Cher, in that the points of themselves deemed an excessive amount of in the course of their careers turn out to be worthwhile and beloved of their 40s and 50s. Miss Piggy won’t ever obtain retaliation from her viewers for not present in life because the unchanging fantasy they maintain of their minds. She received’t have a companion whose mistreatment tarnishes her goddesslike picture. That’s the bittersweet undercurrent of her fame: She will attain a degree of constant public adoration and respect that no dwelling lady would ever be capable to embody. In any case, flesh has its issues. However Miss Piggy is a star nodding to an period by which ladies had been way more than they’re allowed to be now: vivid, dynamic, bigger than life. Shirking relatability for one thing mythic. She is one among our final. And the remainder of the world is lastly realizing it.

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In the event you favor to learn in print, you too can discover this text within the August 24, 2026, concern of
New York Journal.

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In the event you favor to learn in print, you too can discover this text within the August 24, 2026, concern of
New York Journal.