On sockpuppets

gentlebeingsThe intarwebs use the word sockpuppet to mean someone who has created a character for the purpose of supporting his or her arguments by pretending to be someone else. Let’s take a look at that term, shall we?

Most puppets fall into five basic categories broken down by the method in which they are manipulated. You have hand, shadow, string, rod and body. There are endless combinations of those forms, plus sub-categories and also some puppets which defy categories.

In addition to this, you also have overt puppetry, where you see the puppeteer, and covert, where you don’t.

Now Bert, over there on the right, is what we’d call a moving-mouth, hand and rod puppet. He’s not sock puppet, but they’re both operated the same way. Typically, you don’t see the puppeteer with these puppets.

A ventriloquist’s dummy is, by necessity, overt. The puppet itself might be a hand and rod, or it might simply be a rod puppet with a trigger control to work the mouth. Charlie McCarthy worked like this. He’s what you think of when you think of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Jeff Dunham on the other hand, uses a variety of puppets, including a puppet that is very similar, structurally, to Bert. (He’s hilarious, by the way.)

And then there’s Shari Lewis who used, yes, a sock puppet.

The thing is that ventriloquism is a performance technique wherein a single puppeteer tries to create the illusion that there is another character on stage. This character gets to say things that the manipulator can’t say. Sound familiar?

Sure, sock puppets are less expensive to build than a traditional vent’s dummy BUT I do have to defend sockpuppets from the charge that they are not convincing and poorly done. That’s amateur sockpuppetry and amateur ventriloquism is even less convincing. Nothing is quite as distracting as watching someone who is trying not to move their lips and failing.

Professional sockpuppetry can be really quite lovely. Check out the Lady from Sockholm for example. Heck, Kermit is only one step away from sock puppet.

I don’t expect to actually change anyone’s mind about this, because sockpuppet is more fun to say than vent dummy. While I personally think that vent dummy is a better term than sock puppet, fun trumps accuracy almost any day.

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4 thoughts on “On sockpuppets”

  1. I think the idea of sockpuppetry also relates to the fact that it’s so often done impromptu, aka “Someone’s wrong on the internet! Quick, what can I do?” and the shoes go flying across the room and viola!. Barefooted sockpuppetry. To work a ventriloquist’s dummy, you have to have puppetry aforethought.

  2. A talented performer makes you forget the puppet. When people look at Kermit, they think, “Yay! It’s Kermit!” not “Whoa, there’s Jim Henson again, with his hand up the wrong end of a frog.”

    So I think the term sockpuppetry gets tossed about because no one’s convinced. It’s like seeing a spectacularly bad performance. Uncle Garwood, drunk after Christmas dinner, with his hand up a stained tube sock right his foot, telling off-color jokes again, and your mother wincing, embarrassed, and saying, “OMG, there he goes with the sockpuppets. Someone please make him stop.”

    1. Ah, but you’re comparing good ventriloquism with bad sock puppetry, which is part of why I tossed Shari Lewis in there as an example of a good vent sock puppet. My point is that if you strip the two forms down to their purest level that the essence of a vent dummy consists of a single performer trying to convince people that there are two characters on stage. While a sock puppet — I’m speaking of the traditional covert, hand puppet form of it — offers fast and cheap. Unconvincing? Depends on the performer.

      If we compare a bad traditional sock puppet with a bad traditional ventriloquist, the bad vent is going to be less convincing in part due to the uncanny valley effect. We look at a traditional vent dummy and it’s trying to look real, but we all know it’s not. A traditional sock puppet makes no effort to look real or convince anyone. Add to that the difference in performance goals, and I still think that vent dummy is, overall, a more accurate term.

      The only point that I’m really willing to concede is that sockpuppet is way the heck more fun to say.

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