When he spoke at the Tate a few months ago about the relationship between his work and the Gothic, Cooke described his anthropomorphic flowers and vegetables as figures from advertising or children’s stories who have grown up and found themselves in dead-end jobs.

k-punk, “Ontological Rot”

Part of the appeal, to children, of such “children’s favourites” as the Cat in the Hat and Kermit the Frog is that they are already uncanny, disruptive, ineffably sinister and so on. (The machinic frenzy of Dr Seuss’s illustrations is surely the equal of anything in Deleuze and Guattari - and who needs Lacan to tell you that there is no sexual relationship, when you have Kermit and Miss Piggy?) For this reason, the “perversion” effected by Mister Sprinkles and Sad Kermit cannot be understood simply as a corruption of innocence, the injection of “adult” themes into a previously safe and tranquil environment.

To concentrate, for the moment, on Sad Kermit: the one really effective sequence in the video is that in which Kermit, glumly masturbating over a soft-core “glamour” image of Miss Piggy (with one felt nipple exposed), looks over his shoulder at a framed photograph of himself in the loving arms of Jim Henson. This scene neatly maps out a sexual triangle. Why can Kermit neither receive nor return Piggy’s affections? Because he cannot not know that she is a pig wearing lipstick (even though he himself is a talking frog); in other words, he cannot fully or naturally inhabit the diegetic frame within which the rest of the muppets live.

A similar situation arose in a recent production of Cinderella, in which the patter of the “Buttons” character, addressed directly to the audience, was full of knowing references to the artificiality of the scenery, the bizarreness of the villagers’ habit of spontaneously breaking into song-and-dance routines, and so on. Buttons was in love with Cinders, but was doomed to disappointment because he could not become fully part of the story to which she belonged. He always had one foot outside of the diegetic frame, and thus could not intervene to change the fundamental direction of the narrative.

At the end of the production, after Cinders had been married off to Prince Charming, Buttons consoled himself with the knowledge that Goldilocks had just moved into the cottage in the woods (“and she’s a cracker!”); but his position in relation to her story was bound to be the same.

Buttons’s inexorable romantic ill-fortune was thus structurally necessary: he was bound to desire the female lead in the story (since part of his job was to signify her desirability to the audience), but she was bound to be oblivious to his feelings since they occurred in a completely heterogenous domain to the one in which she lived and moved and had her being. Within the context of Cinderella, the love of Cinders for Prince Charming is, like Piggy’s appetite within the context of The Muppet Show for Kermit’s attention, an irrevocable and inexplicable given of the situation. To the outsider it may appear opaque and even somewhat horrifyingly illogical. But Kermit’s problem with regard to Piggy is that he, like Buttons, is just such an outsider.

Kermit and Jim Henson were often seen together: the muppet and the muppeteer, in symbiosis. Whereas in the Sad Kermit video Piggy fills the frame of her own portrait, Kermit appears with his (and her) creator, the benevolent and kindly patriarch. Kermit, in Henson’s own words, was not just an “alter ego” for his creator, but a direct extension of his own extemporaneous personality: “I like to work Kermit because there’s a lot of leeway for ad-libbing, which I don’t have with most other characters but I’m not sure that I’m not Kermit”. A unique and terrible problem for the creature: “my creator is not sure that he isn’t me” (compare the old joke: Q: What’s the difference between God and Tony Blair? A: God doesn’t think he’s Tony Blair). How are normal sexual relations supposed to be possible under such circumstances?

The joke of Sad Kermit is supposed to be that Kermit without Henson is a lost soul, abandoned to drink and drugs and desperate sex. But the real hurt and damage at the heart of Kermit’s biography derives from Henson’s invasively intimate, possessive presence, not his absence. If Kermit were just another muppet, the pathos of the scene with the two photographs would be impossible: you couldn’t make it work with Fozzy.

A final thought: does not Sad Kermit, with his addictions to heroin and booze, present precisely that image which Zizek identifies as the symbolic obverse of the ideal sexual relationship between man and woman, namely, a frog embracing a bottle of beer? He is a frog who cannot become a prince (that is, cannot be fully absorbed into the fantasy world of the muppets); his “drug hell” of liquor and pills is precisely the hedonic real from which Piggy’s embraces might have delivered him…