KrazyJoe: How do you handle something like the Steve Whitmire situation especially since you know these guys personally? Is that a tricky thing to maneuver for you?
Joe Hennes: Yeah, incredibly. It's hard because, technically we are members of the press. And we need to be able to report on things with no emotion, no attachment, with no bias whatsoever. And it's tough because, Steve in particular was our first big interview. He was always incredibly kind to us and did a lot of fun stuff with us over the years. So that was a particularly tough one. We also have a policy on ToughPigs where we don't talk about the puppeteers' personal lives at all. It was the same thing when the Kevin Clash news hit, and we reported very early on that we will not be reporting on this issue. The only news story you'll find on ToughPigs about that was that Kevin had resigned and decided to leave the role of Elmo. We had no interest in following the drama of the story, it didn't feel like it was important to Muppet fandom, and it felt a little icky to be talking about puppeteers' personal lives, or even their professional lives when it comes to things like firing. That's a really tough thing to navigate. Especially since the Muppet performers are the nicest people in the world, and the last thing we wanna do, just because they're the nicest people, is to report on anything that makes them look bad. That doesn't help us, that doesn't help them, and it really doesn't help Muppet fandom. Also the Muppet performers are like the anti-Kardashians, all we know about the Kardashians are their personal lives. And for the life of me, I do not understand why people subscribe to US Weekly. Like, that blows my mind, I don't understand it.
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