I’ve got a lot in common with Elmo. We both have fish that we largely ignore. We’re both very ticklish. We’ve both hosted late-night talk shows on HBO that were cancelled after two seasons.
And we’re both over Rocco.
We’re over Rocco for different reasons, sure. Elmo’s over Rocco because he gets annoyed that Zoe and the rest of the world treat him as a real living creature, even though Rocco is just a rock. He gets annoyed that he doesn’t get the last cookie because Zoe wants to give it to Rocco. He’s over Rocco because sometimes Zoe seems to put more effort into her relationship with a pet rock than she does with her friend Elmo.
As for me, I’m over Rocco because it seems to be the only joke Sesame Street is willing to do anymore. Listen, I have a lot of things to say about the current way Sesame Street works, and a lot of them are not positive. But one thing that significantly bothers me is that Sesame Street just isn’t funny anymore. They used to be willing to go with the joke, even if it went over the heads of the children watching. But now, studies show that if a child doesn’t understand something, maybe they’ll feel silly, and if they feel silly, maybe they won’t want to watch the show anymore. And Sesame Street is so terrified of this that the show has become an overly saturated facsimile of what it was, with the most basic jokes imaginable.
And man, they sure love that Rocco joke!
Let’s back up a little. In Season 30, way back in early January 1999, Sesame Street introduced Zoe’s pet rock, Rocco. The premise was simple: Elmo must keep doing things for Rocco, like singing his favourite song. But Elmo knows that Rocco isn’t alive, so he gets frustrated, blows up, and then Zoe and Elmo reconcile at the end – even if Elmo still doesn’t believe that Rocco is alive. A lot of this episode’s segments are about the differences between what is and what isn’t alive. But we’ll come back to that.
Rocco made a handful of appearances over the next 14 seasons, but the concept was largely abandoned and Rocco made his way to the wall of dead puppets. I’ve heard there were times that some writers wanted to make a Rocco joke, but were told that “no-one knows who Rocco is anymore,” and so the jokes were left unwritten. Zoe basically never mentioned him again.
Then, in January 2022, a TikTok user uploaded a compilation of Elmo’s beef with Rocco, with some genuinely funny moments. Elmo’s “Oh well, too bad, bye Rocco” when the rock is unable to float is a personal favourite. Because the internet loves funny videos, it went viral, with more people uploading their own favourite gags or lip-syncing along. Suddenly, Rocco was a star again. It was a fun time to be a Sesame Street fan. It was even more fun when Sesame Street got on board and Elmo had to be reunited with his long-lost nemesis.
It really went into overdrive. Saturday Night Live parodied it on Weekend Update in a strange segment that seemed like they’d written it in the hopes of getting actual Elmo, but had to settle for Chloe Fineman in an Elmo costume. Corporations got on board, making tweets and memes. The real Elmo appeared on E! News to discuss it. It became a pop culture hit for a while.
Over the last couple of years, Sesame Street has gone through its fair share of changes, not all of them for the better. ToughPigs has written a lot about its trajectory, so I won’t harp on about it now. But as I mentioned before, the cardinal sin of the show is that it’s stopped being funny. Gone are the days of parody segments, now largely relegated to YouTube videos or social media posts. The cast has been largely stripped back, meaning a lot less for a lot of the funnier characters to do. And while the performers are still the heart and soul of the show (and doing a terrific job – to be clear, none of my issues have ever come from any of them), the show seems to be transforming into what Barney was in the ’90s: bright and simple.
In 2024, France hosted the Summer Olympics. For some reason, NBC sent Elmo, Cookie Monster, Abby Cadabby, and Tango over to be a part of their coverage. Sure. Why not?
They also sent someone else: Rocco.
In more than one video, an Olympian would surprise Elmo with Rocco, who would, obviously, get annoyed about it. That’s the joke.
Flash forward to this year’s Winter Olympics, and guess who turned up again? Did you guess Rocco? I’ll give you one guess as to what the joke was in those videos. Apparently the easiest thing to do with these champions isn’t to have them answer a fun question from Elmo, but to do a clone of the same joke we’ve been seeing since 1999.
For fun, I jumped on Sesame Street’s TikTok to crunch some numbers. Taking into account only the videos that have been made for social media (so not including episode clips) that feature Elmo, I counted approximately 45 since 1 January 2024, with some double-ups in there. Of those, approximately 17 featured Rocco, or some reference to Rocco – the joke always – ALWAYS – being the same: someone mentions Rocco to Elmo, who gets annoyed. 17 videos out of 45. That’s almost 38% of new Elmo content being Rocco-related.
Even Amelia Dimoldenberg of Chicken Shop Date fame stooped to a tired Rocco gag in her date with Elmo. Was that her idea, or Sesame’s? Because it certainly seems like they took the prop along.
I was particularly outraged at the most recent of these; Elmo meeting Ryan Gosling. Ryan has proven himself to be a willing participant in comedy; his recent stint hosting Saturday Night Live is proof of that. In the video, which you can see above, Ryan surprises Elmo with a pipecleaner model of him, made by Ryan’s friend… Rocky. He explains that even though Rocky is just a rock, they’re friends. Elmo almost concedes, but… rocks aren’t alive! Now, I fully understand that some of these celebrities are brought into a room and told, “Hey, you’ll be doing a bit with Elmo,” and it has to be simple because they’ve got 100 other things they need to be doing that day. But Gosling is capable of so much more, so to give him a simple, recurring, tired rock skit really annoyed me.
(Note: After publishing, I was made aware that Gosling’s co-star in ‘Project Hail Mary’ is named Rocky, which adds some context to this bit. It still isn’t funny, though)
You know who isn’t in any of those videos? Zoe. Yes, somehow Sesame Street has forgotten that the key driving force behind Rocco was a little girl playing with her pet rock. There’s no Zoe saying that she brought Rocco along to the Winter Olympics because he’s a fan of Alysa Liu. There’s no Zoe saying she and Rocco have crashed Elmo’s date with Amelia because the rock just really loves fries. So that means one of two things:
Either Sesame Street has abandoned the idea that Rocco is just a rock and is, in fact, alive, taking himself to all these places, which goes against that entire first episode about what is and isn’t alive that I mentioned way back earlier in this piece. Or it means that the world has decided it’s okay to mess with Elmo, and everyone is doing it just to get a rise out of him. Either one of those “jokes” just doesn’t sit right with me. Rocco is, as Elmo says, just a rock. That’s the gag. That’s why it was initially funny. So by giving him some sort of sentience, you’ve essentially killed the joke. Or you’ve made it so that everyone is messing with Elmo purely in order to screw with him, without making him in on the joke. And it’s been so overdone now that it’s just… not funny.
I just wish Sesame Street was allowed to be funnier, and I wish they’d give themselves more chances to tell some different jokes. Ryan Dillon is capable of so much great comedy. I can’t imagine how tiring it must be to have to do the same bit over and over and over again.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just remembered I haven’t cleaned my fish tank since 2011.
By Jarrod Fairclough – [email protected]
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