Elmo: The Hardest Working Black man in Show Biz

Yes, I am refer­ring to the fuzzy, red star of Sesame Street. Let me start this post off by say­ing I adore Elmo. I never thought I would find myself as an adult gush­ing over a pup­pet, but Elmo is unique. So much so that when my kids were small we watched Sesame Street every day, but I looked for­ward to the seg­ment of the show called Elmo’s World. My kids are older but they still love him as well.

I recently saw this adorable clip from The Wendy Williams show of Elmo singing a song to her:

video credit: The Wendy Williams Show

I mean, what’s not to love? But, inter­est­ingly even though Elmo seems to have a life of his own he is the cre­ation of African-​American mas­ter pup­peteer Kevin Clash who also voices this lov­able crea­ture.

Amazingly Kevin Clash dur­ing his 20 years as Elmo has worked with numer­ous celebri­ties, actors and musi­cians. Besides doing his daily part on Sesame Street, accord­ing to his IMDb pro­file, Kevin Clash has been involved in over 150 projects involv­ing Elmo. He also has a long list of cred­its as pro­ducer, direc­tor, pup­peteer and numer­ous appear­ances as him­self. He has also gar­nered over nine Daytime Emmys for his work. Mr. Clash’ work ethic is what sep­a­rates him from so many and what I believe makes Elmo so lov­able.

Here is Elmo inter­view­ing Kevin Clash which means that Elmo is actu­ally inter­view­ing him­self or is it Kevin Clash is inter­view­ing him­self? I don’t know, just watch.

In this world where from a young age chil­dren are sur­rounded by neg­a­tive images Elmo always warms hearts when he says: “Elmo loves you”, sings, dances or gig­gles. What he does-​though it seems so simple-​has done so much for chil­dren as he always advo­cates the pos­i­tive. Although I imag­ine by now he is very rich you can tell that Kevin Clash gen­uinely loves his job and has never been moti­vated by his own fame or greed. Just his sin­cere desire to make peo­ple happy. No doubt he will con­tinue to work hard to bring smiles to the faces of chil­dren young and old around the world.

Thanks for read­ing,