Brian Henson
Brian Henson
Brian Hensonis an American puppeteer, director, producer, technician, and the chairman of The Jim Henson Company. He is the son of puppeteers Jim and Jane Henson...
ProfessionTV Producer
Date of Birth3 November 1963
CityNew York City, NY
mom dad puppets
My dad and mom were, they would take what were popular hits, and lip-sync to them with puppets and do a ridiculous story.
fun attitude puppets
We're also irreverent, we have an irreverent attitude towards puppets, as well. So a lot of what we do is we're kind of making fun of the puppets for being puppets, even while we're doing it. And again, that all feeds into the absurdity of this show.
dad special puppets
But initially when I was working with my dad, it was in special effects puppets with radio control and motors and puppet effects.
thinking puppets
I think it's a lot richer than what we call fleshy improv, I think it's very funny, puppet improv and fleshy improv.
puppets festivals comedy
And then after the success at Melbourne Comedy Festival, then we regrouped back in LA and we went back into workshopping and decided to develop a proper show and that's when we started working on "Stuffed and Unstrung," which is a much bigger and sharper version of "Puppet Up."
puppets festivals aspens
We took a show to the Aspen Comedy Festival, called "Puppet Up" at that point, and in Aspen we just did three shows, and in Aspen, there was a producer from the Edinborough Fringe Festival, who said, "Please come to Edinborough."
fun puppets comedy
he puppeteers really responded to it. Patrick Bistrow really responded to it, it's great fun to do improve comedy with puppets.
pigs puppets cows
First of all, you're improvising through a puppet, so you're not always yourself: you're a cow or you're a pig or you're an old woman, you know, whatever puppet you pick, or you're a demon, you know, whatever you pick up, that's what you get to be in the scene.
style trying puppets
So while you're trying to improvise, you're also trying to puppeteer, you're doing everything that you need to do to perform a puppet in our style, for a camera.
blessing get-better puppets
A puppet that starts to improvise badly is almost funnier than the puppet that's improvising well. So the show gets better when the improvising is really good, but also the show can also sometimes get better when the improvising sort of goes a little wrong and that's sort of a blessing to improvising with puppets.
movies muppet releasing
We're used to releasing Muppet movies in the off-season, not on the on-season. We've always done well that way.
advanced nasa stuff thinking
I was very advanced in physics, so I thought that something in astrophysics was where I would go ? I was thinking about NASA and stuff like that.
breaking family reached school tour visitor youth
Where we used to just look at the visitor as a whole, now we are breaking it down to families, youth groups, school groups, tourists, tour groups, ... A family is going to be reached differently from a school group.
course dad decided definitely full grade liked run stuff tv
Lew Grade told my dad, I'll make your TV show. I know it's going to be a big hit,' ... The show had definitely not run its course when my dad decided to end the show. My dad just liked doing a lot of stuff. He was so full of stuff he wanted to do.