Book
The Rainbow Connection: The Life and Times of Richard Hunt, a work in progress, is the definitive biography of Muppet performer Richard Hunt, a general interest book for all audiences.
Richard Hunt joined the Muppets with his characteristic gregarious pluck, cold-calling them from a Manhattan pay phone on a whim one beautiful June afternoon in 1970. He was 19, a year out of his North Jersey high school. “Hi, I’m a puppeteer, can you use me?” he asked cheerily. He was in luck: Jim Henson’s company was auditioning for a new production that very afternoon. Hunt ran over and landed the gig.
From these impulsive beginnings Richard Hunt launched a masterful two-decade career with the world’s most popular puppet troupe: the Muppets. As part of the central core of performers on both children’s television blockbuster Sesame Street and adult megahit The Muppet Show – called “the most popular television entertainment on earth” by Time magazine – Hunt brought to life such puppet icons as squeaky lab assistant Beaker, elderly balcony heckler Statler and mellow valley girl Janice, as well as helping to develop Miss Piggy and Elmo.
A genius comic performer, Hunt was a “funny boy” in another respect as well – that being his lingo for gay – living it up in the liberatory post-Stonewall culture of New York in the 1970s, confronting the plague of AIDS as it decimated gay male circles in the 80s, and succumbing to AIDS-related causes in 1992, only 40 years old. A compelling trickster character, Hunt brought his joyful creativity to all endeavors; his life story gleefully problematizes the boundaries between work and play, performance and authenticity, children’s and adult entertainment.
In 2009, I published a 90-page chapbook version of The Rainbow Connection, a review of the already existing material about Hunt, drawn from about 100 secondary sources, including interviews with his family, friends and colleagues; Henson and Sesame‘s own publications and press; the voluminous Muppet Wiki; and of course Hunt’s own performances. The chapbook became a surprise runaway success, distributed throughout the US and as far away as Australia, Singapore and England. A 15-city cross-country tour drew crowds at bookstores, colleges and theaters, including a full house at New York’s Dixon Place.
The Rainbow Connection: The Life and Times of Richard Hunt builds on the chapbook’s meticulous research, but adds over four dozen primary sources, firsthand interviews with his family, friends and colleagues. It is the definitive biography of a man whose expansive spirit shines through his work. Hunt’s words eulogizing Jim Henson apply equally to himself: “He did not live for the moment. Instead, he lived in the moment.” Though his work is iconic, Hunt himself is curiously invisible — and his story is long overdue.