How do you feel about Elmo?
It might depend on how old you were one autumn 40 years ago, when the diminutive, fuzzy red monster first appeared as a regular character on the educational children’s television program “Sesame Street.” If you were a small child who watched the PBS mainstay in its earlier years, you were conditioned by the classic cast of Jim Henson’s eclectic, irreverent monsters: In other words, you’re Team Grover. If you were a toddler viewer in the latter half of the ’80s and beyond, it was Elmo who left an indelible imprint on your rapidly developing brain. November 1985, Season 17 of “Sesame Street”: This is the Muppet meridian.
Elmo is arguably the most beloved of “Sesame Street’s” Muppets. The adoration and enthusiasm of the show’s littlest viewers catapulted him from generic background monster to omnipresent starring character. His is the face that launched a million Tickle Me Elmos off toy store shelves in the run-up to Christmas in 1996. Through four decades’ worth of on-screen storytelling, branded products and children’s books, he has taught innumerable toddlers lessons like how to count, how to use the potty and how to express their emotions.
Elmo is also arguably the most detested of “Sesame Street’s” Muppets. He’s been referred to as the “little red menace.” He’s been accused of ruining the show. Cultural pundit Joel Stein called him an “annoying tool.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David throttled him on live TV.
This divide is sometimes posited as a snarky-Gen-Xer-versus-narcissistic-millennial dichotomy, but the truth of our outsize responses to Elmo is more complicated than that. And if Elmo has taught us anything, it’s that when we have big feelings, we should probably talk about them.
People sometimes initiate this conversation with Abby Whitaker, a Sesame Street scholar and assistant professor of history at Brevard College in North Carolina. “One of the most common questions I get is people kind of incredulously asking: ‘What is the appeal of Elmo? I hate him. I don’t get it,’” she says. “I have to always tell people, ‘You’re not going to like the answer, but the answer is: You’re too old.’”
When “Sesame Street” started in 1969, the target audience was 4- and 5-year-olds, says Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president of global education for Sesame Workshop, the international nonprofit behind the show. The goal was to help prepare older preschoolers for kindergarten, with Muppets serving as role models: Big Bird was 6 years old. Aloysius Snuffleupagus (a.k.a. Snuffy) was 5. Others (Cookie Monster, Grover, Bert and Ernie) were ageless adults.
“But as the show evolved and grew, and the audience grew, and the popularity grew, we noticed that younger and younger children were watching ‘Sesame,’” Truglio says. “And with the focus on 3-year-olds going to preschool, we thought it would be best to have a character that represented them, that they could relate to. A character that would be a peer.”
That character came to life in the hands of Muppeteer Kevin Clash, who created Elmo as we know him — his falsetto voice, his boundless exuberance, his indefatigable sense of wonder. Clash was a master of manipulating the “magic triangle” — the particular alignment of a Muppet’s eyeballs and nose — to make Elmo’s face especially expressive, Whitaker says. (Clash left Sesame Workshop in 2012 following accusations of sexual abuse; the charges were later dismissed. Muppeteer Ryan Dillon has performed as Elmo ever since.)
Everything about “Sesame Street” is guided by research and the input of child-development experts; Elmo is no exception. His vocal pitch and intonation mimic the instinctive, exaggerated way of speaking that adults use with babies and very little children. His behaviors and skills mirror the developmental capacity and curiosity of his designated age cohort. When Elmo keeps asking whyyy, or erupts into piercing giggles, or talks about himself — that’s Elmo just doing his job.
“Even the fact that Elmo speaks in third person, that’s exactly what a toddler is going to do,” says Julie Dobrow, a senior lecturer in Tufts University’s child study and human development department. “That is very common at the developmental stage where a child is exploring their own identity and making the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other.’”
Which brings us to perhaps the most common accusation leveraged against the wee Muppet: that Elmo is self-absorbed.
“There was a cultural criticism of him for a while that he represented the ‘me’ generation, that he’s so self-obsessed,” Whitaker says. Consider the original iteration of “Elmo’s World,” the 15-minute Elmo-centric show-within-a-show that closed every hour-long episode of “Sesame Street” between 1998 and 2009. Elmo’s world revolves around Elmo: He loves his goldfish and his crayons, too, and his attention is focused on what he is feeling and thinking and learning. (He is, in other words, 3.)
Elmo might have felt like a sharp tonal pivot for people who were more accustomed to the clever humor and snarky counterculture vibes of Henson’s older Muppet characters and productions. “Sesame Street” has always been designed for a family viewing experience, with jokes and plot twists that wink toward the parents in the room. But Elmo, specifically, was simply not created for adults. (If that bothers one disproportionately, it might not be Elmo who is self-obsessed.)
There could also be some misplaced growing pains, where Elmo is concerned; change is hard, nostalgia is potent, and Elmo became the increasingly prominent face of “Sesame Street” during a period of significant transition. By the early 1990s, the show was facing more competition — particularly from “Barney & Friends” — and the target demographic was starting to skew younger. Meanwhile, federal funding had been largely phased out, the program had begun accepting corporate sponsors, and merchandise “really became essential to keeping the Workshop afloat,” Whitaker says. To sell toys, “Sesame Street” needed to cultivate especially popular characters.
To some, this felt counter to the purity of the program’s mission, she notes: “It’s about education for the kids, it’s about doing good, and all of that should be divorced from commercialism. But then you have parents stampeding over each other to try to buy the Tickle Me Elmo doll,” Whitaker says. “So, a lot of that is put on him.” Which isn’t exactly fair, she adds. (Elmo might exist within a flawed system, but capitalism is not Elmo’s fault.)
What if we engaged with Elmo on his own terms? What would we find if we looked closer at all he’s accomplished in his tenure? Dobrow sees a caring and complex character: “Elmo is actually a really good friend,” she says.
In 2004, Elmo was bewildered and exasperated by his friend Zoe’s devotion to her pet rock, Rocco, but he ultimately came to embrace her sense of imagination. In 2011, Elmo helped Curly Bear learn to let go of her pacifier by telling her about his own experience surrendering his “binky.” When “Sesame Street” introduced Julia, an autistic Muppet character, in 2017, Elmo supported her and helped Big Bird understand how to interpret her behavior. During a visit with actor Andrew Garfield last year, Elmo listened with empathy as Garfield shared his grief for his mother. Over the decades, young children have seen Elmo be frightened, sad, confused, overly excited — a relatable and important range of emotions, Dobrow says: “Children have to learn these prosocial problem-solving skills, and Elmo is a wonderful role model.”
He’s a pretty solid role model for adults, too. The first children to come of age in the time of Elmo are grown-ups now, and the ongoingness of that parasocial bond is more apparent — never more so than last year, when Elmo went viral on X after posting the simplest of questions: “Elmo is just checking in!” he wrote. “How is everybody doing?”
Everybody was not doing great. More than 19,000 replies accumulated — a cascade of gallows humor, earnest appreciation and genuine despair. Elmo offered heartfelt replies to many, and his account soon followed up with links to mental health resources. President Joe Biden weighed in to echo Elmo’s sentiment of compassion. For the Muppet’s grown-up, very online fans, it was a vaguely Fred Rogers-esque moment — here was an iconic character they had loved as a child, still offering comfort and guidance at a moment when they needed it.
Elmo himself can’t truly reflect on the passage of all that time; in his mind, he’s been 3½ years old every single day of the past four decades. It’s unclear how he would account for all he’s seen and done across that span — the multiple visits to the White House; his historic testimony before Congress (he spoke in support of music education); his many rounds on the talk show circuit (one could hope he’s repressed the Larry David incident); the years of “Elmo’s World” followed by years of “Elmo: The Musical” followed by years of “Elmo’s World,” rebooted; the abiding virality of his many memes.
“Sesame Street” has kept adapting to a shifting media landscape — moving away from federal grants and toward philanthropic donors; dropping from an episode length of 60 minutes to 30; establishing licensing deals first with HBO and now with Netflix, where the show’s 56th season premiered this month (new episodes also air on PBS, the show’s constant and original home, on the same day). Through it all, Elmo keeps reaching new heights: Just last month, he dropped a remix of his classic toothbrushing instructions song — now titled “Brushy Brush” — performed as a duet with the reigning human star of children’s media, Ms. Rachel.
Cultural norms change, political administrations change, licensing arrangements change, but Elmo — at least, the fundamental Elmo-ness of Elmo — never does. That’s the whole point of him, the studied design and intention of him: to endure timelessly, to remain eternally 3 and therefore accessible to any generation’s 3-year-olds.
Whitaker’s daughter is not yet 3. But she’s already part of the second generation of children in her family to love the little red Muppet. His was the third name she spoke, Whitaker says: “Mama, Dada — Elmo.”
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