A Letter To Wil Wheaton About Elmo

Elmo got beat up. Wil Wheaton had a tantrum. I have some thoughts.

Graphic design is one of my passions.

A few weeks ago, Elmo from Sesame Street sent a tweet asking how people were doing. Lots of mentally ill people then replied to that tweet with a lot of “i am doing terrible because the world is stressful” stuff. Elmo was then moved to send another tweet in which he said that he was happy he had asked how people were doing, and he told everyone to hang in there, and expressed his love.

Elmo then became a cause celebre for mental health awareness.

He went on the TODAY Show to talk about how it’s ok to feel sad sometimes. Elmo is a puppet with an annoying voice who talks about himself in the third person. This whole thing was excruciating and embarrassing and a sign of American decline. So Larry David, a comedian known for being a bit of a grouch, walked on stage and punched him in the face. (Except not really. He sort of lightly jerked his face around and pantomimed beating him up.)

The TODAY hosts were scandalized. “You’ve gone too far, Larry,” one host shouted. They then bullied Larry David into apologizing to Elmo.

But Larry David wasn’t actually sorry for hitting Elmo, and when asked about this incident on a late-night talk show, he doubled down and said he had no regrets. “I’d do it again,” he promised to cheers and laughter.

However, the reaction was not so positive in the part of the country where the doors lock from the outside and the walls have pads on them.

There, Larry David was a beast, an animal. He had assaulted poor Elmo on national television. What would the children think? On The View, Joy Behar said that these histrionic snowflakes were little babies that needed a bottle. The other hosts, some of whom are little babies who need a bottle, attacked Joy Behar and said she was out of touch. She was making excuses for Larry David, a violent sociopath, who had, in one TODAY Show appearance, traumatized an entire generation of youth. Joy Behar scoffed at the idea that little children were even watching, and her cohosts clapped back and were like, Joy, you fucking idiot, all the children love the TODAY Show.

One lunatic on the show kept screaming at Joy Behar about how Elmo is not a puppet. He’s a muppet. This is a bit like saying, “It’s not a tissue; it’s a Kleenex.” Or “it’s not TV, it’s HBO.” It’s both.

Anyways, then they all took a round of Thorazine, and the world moved on.

Until…

Wil Wheaton likes Elmo, doesn’t like Larry David

Wil Wheaton, a child actor from the 1980s who has achieved a sort of second life as a weird nerdy internet personality that Gen X liberals with emotional problems really like, watched the clip of Larry David violently doing an attempted murder on poor Elmo, and he was very upset.

To Facebook, breathlessly he took!

So I heard about Larry David assaulting Elmo on life television, but didn't watch it until now, because I knew it would upset me.

Holy shit it's even worse than I thought. What the fuck is wrong with that guy? Elmo is, like, the best friend to multiple generations of children. In the Sesame Street universe, ELMO IS A CHILD, who is currently putting mental health and caring for others in the spotlight.

And Larry Fucking David ... did ... that? And thought it was going to be ... funny? What?

What an asshole. What a stupid, self-centered, tone deaf asshole.

Full disclosure: all the time, when I was growing up, my dad would grab me by the shoulders and shake me while he screamed in my face. He choked me more than once. He was always out of control, always in a furious rage, and always terrifying. I'm a 51-year-old man, and my heart is pounding right now, recalling how I felt when I was a little boy who loved Grover the way today's kids love Elmo.

The 51-year-old man with unprocessed childhood trauma then pivoted to addressing Larry David directly.

Larry David, this was not okay, and your obviously insincere "apology" clearly communicates that you don't get that.

First of all, you aren't even in the segment, but you just decided to barge in and draw focus because ... why? You couldn't stand that a puppet brought people together in a meaningful way that you can't? You couldn't stand that your appearance on national television to promote your wildly successful series was delayed for a few seconds while the adults talked about mental health? You wanted to manufacture a viral moment where everyone gets to see what an asshole you are, so they'll tune in and watch you portray an asshole in the last season of your show that celebrates how great it is to be an asshole without ever experiencing the consequences of being an asshole?

…

Elmo inspired a deeply meaningful and important moment of collective support among disparate people who have been struggling through the traumas of a pandemic, daily mass shootings, the rise of fascism and everything associated with Trump's violence and cruelty.

And shitty idiot Larry David couldn't leave it alone, for some reason. He had to indirectly tell everyone who opened their hearts to a Muppet that they were stupid, and he thought it was a good joke to physically attack and choke this character who is beloved by children and adults alike. You know what that tells impressionable young people about sharing their feelings?

..

With one question, Elmo got lots and lots of people speaking openly and honestly about their mental health. A nontrivial number of people who none of us will ever know were inspired by it, and that was the last little nudge they needed to make the call or send the email to being healing. Elmo probably saved lives and relationships by opening that conversation.

The post is incredibly long. However long you think it is, it is longer. Some of the people who read it commented that Wil Wheaton needed to get a sense of humor. Wil Wheaton did not like this and started banning those people and deleting their evil comments. He then commented himself:

Listen, if you're here to dismissively blather on about how I can't take a joke, or it was just a joke, or I'm too sensitive, or whatever else comes from your Bag of Invalidation, please just leave.

A lot of us who had the same visceral reaction to a grown man putting his hands on a child (Elmo is 4 years old) in anger, without consent, and then laughing about it all share an experience that you should be grateful you don't share with us. And when you say your shitty little toxic and cruel thing, when you reduce the whole thing to a puppet and a joke, you're doing to us what the adults around us did when we were kids. And it hurts all over again.

Are you really someone who wants to hurt another person simply because you can? Maybe take the impulse to be a jerk and redirect it into being grateful you have no idea why this is so upsetting to so many of us.

This is a very loaded rhetorical question. It is not fair framing. Lots of people process their own personal traumas with humor. Other people don’t. It is silly to suggest that everyone who thought this overreaction was a bit much has spent their entire lives on the corner of Candy Cane Lane and Gum Drop Avenue. One could say that making assumptions about someone’s past entirely on their response to Larry David roughing up Elmo and Wil Wheaton having a conniption fit over it is the sort of thing one might find in a Bag of Invalidation. (We’ll get back to this Invalidation Bag at the end.)

Nevertheless, just as Wil Wheaton found himself daydreaming about what he would say to Larry David, given the chance, I found myself daydreaming about what I would say to Wil Wheaton, given the chance. Normally, I would just tweet at him, but he appears to have preemptively blocked me, so I must do it here.

Dear Wil Wheaton,