Every relationship has conflict. Even the ones that seem perfect on the outside (and here I am referring to Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson). How you deal with conflict is an important part of a mature, healthy relationship (and I am no longer referring to Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson). This holds true here at Man Version HQ — it is a lot of work to remain together when she is so, so wrong.

While Maria and I agree on an awful lot, there has been one speed bump on the road to cohabitational Nirvana: Snuffleupagus. The brown furry elephant thing befriended by Big Bird on Sesame Street.

The Conflict

Maria’s view (technically, the “wrong” or “bullshit” view) is that Snuffleupagus (or “Snuffy”) is a visible, tangible entity like Big Bird himself, and pretty much everything else on the show. The reason that only Big Bird could see him was simply epic, sequential moments of bad timing; that is, Snuffy wandered off right as other Sesame Street denizens approached the scene.

My view (the “right” or “reasonable” or “I love America” view) is that Snuffy was initially only visible to Big Bird. In fact, until Snuffy’s appearance to all in 1985 (in response to parental concerns about friends kept secret from parents), there was ample evidence to suggest the Snuffy existed only in Big Bird’s mind.

For both Maria and myself, it never occurred to us that our views weren’t universally held until we stumbled into the topic many years ago. Maria still claims her view is universally held except by “idiots.”

And so it continued, until the morning of February 16, 2010, when the meddlers at Sesame Street said the following on Twitter:

Snuffleupagus was never invisible. He has always lived on Sesame Street – he just had inconvenient timing.

Maria views this as conclusive evidence that her worldview is valid.

While I appreciate learning the proper spelling of “Snuffleupagus,” I intend to show that the good tweeters at Sesame Street are — indeed, must be — mistaken.I don’t know why the 8 can see him…

Visual Evidence

Unfortunately, YouTube failed me. While there are many videos of Snuffleupagus (or “Snuffy”), they all either don’t involve humans coming on to the scene or are clips from after he began appearing to everyone in 1985. I am not digging any deeper out of fear of Rule 34.

I did find this, but it’s hardly conclusive.

Snuffleupagus in Detail

We don’t have any vital statistics on Snuffy. In fact, we cannot even confirm that the pronoun “he” is correct. (I don’t intend to look for such evidence. We’re talking about Sesame Street, for Christ’s sake, not something on Bravo.)

Physically, Snuffy looks to be about halfway along an imaginary evolutionary path between a woolly mammoth and a modern walrus. He is easily the largest resident of the Street, except for Big Bird himself (assuming Elmo doesn’t have a mind-bendingly enormous ass). For purposes of this article, I’ll assume Snuffy weighs about as much as an average adult moose (roughly 1,500 pounds, or 680 kg).

Despite being a quadruped, Snuffy’s gait is a slow, ungainly shuffle from side to side, more reminiscent of a sea lion than an elephant. It makes me think Snuffy would be reasonably agile in the water, but possesses mollusk-like speed on land.

Problems with the Bad Timing Theory

Character

First of all, let’s look at simple etiquette. Available evidence suggests Snuffy is a friendly, social creature. He lives in a densely populated area and speaks English at an advanced level. There are no known predators of any kind on Sesame Street (unless you believe cookies to be a life form), much less one capable of threatening Snuffy. Even the local vampire eschews the bloodsucking in favor of a maniacal need to inventory things. (Whether the Count is OCD can be the subject of another paper.)

Snuffy’s only threat is disease or accident, unless they keep a loaded shotgun behind the counter at Hooper’s Store. You know – for punks.

While Snuffy tends to be melancholic, it has never manifested in any anti-social activity. Indeed, his alleged melancholia may be illusory, fed by his slow speech and stride.

Given that, why would Snuffy immediately leave when anyone other than Big Bird approached? Snuffy and BB could be in the middle of a pleasant conversation when someone offscreen would shout BB’s name. When BB turned to acknowledge the call, Snuffy rudely flees? Over the years, Snuffy allowed BB’s other friends to assume BB was either lying or delusional, instead of standing his ground? Eventually, even someone as remarkably amiable as BB would resent this behavior.

(According to the people who tweet from the Sesame Street account, Snuffy just had bad timing and left at the wrong time, every time. But for Snuffy to just turn and walk away in the middle of a conversation, or to stubbornly depart despite repeated entreaties from his only friend — this is not behavior you could call “badly timed.” This is more “pathologically antisocial.”)

Proponents of this view may claim that Snuffy suffered a debilitating case of shyness, but that’s silly. First of all, Sesame Street is in one of the most populated urban environments on Earth. Growing up orphaned on the streets of Brooklyn may lead to a host of problems, but doing so isolated from every other creature in the area would not engender the highly social skills Snuffy exhibited first with BB, then later with everyone else.

Also, Snuffy is shy, so he approaches the one creature in the area physically larger than himself? If anyone was going to be a threat to Snuffy, it is BB. Of course, BB does not possess a threatening nature — indeed, you could extort all manner of things from BB with just a stern look — but how would Snuffy know that? If he spied on BB first, then he would have seen that all the other, smaller beings were equally kind and unthreatening. Why would Snuffy risk approaching the one creature who could turn and peck the everloving shit out of him? Wouldn’t Snuffy have been better off befriending, say, the ridiculously unintimidating Grover?

Hiding

Assuming for a moment that Snuffy was simply allergic to humans, where did he go when he walked away from these meetings? In Sesame Street, the walls may literally have ears. Every rodent, every insect, and every reptile or amphibian (“hi, ho!”) freely and easily communicate with each other and with their human neighbors. They would witness Snuffy’s presence, his poorly timed (or spiteful) departures, and BB’s frequent, desperate entreaties of Snuffy’s existence. Since the rats, bugs, and frogs on Sesame Street are as kindhearted as everything else that does not live in a trash can, it is reasonable to assume they would set the matter straight. You can doubt the sanity of a giant yellow bird, but it’s tougher to argue with an army of spiders and cockroaches.

This brings us to the most glaring problem with the Bad Timing Theory…

Physics

Sesame Street is a straight, flat stretch of pavement maybe 200 feet long. Snuffy weighs three-quarters of a ton and moves at less than a normal human walking pace. Regardless of his reasons for leaving, BB’s human friends would not see an empty space that BB claims recently held Snuffy. They would see Snuffy’s giant furry ass slowly receding, as though they were backing away from a Robin Williams nude scene.

Since we lack a detailed map of Sesame Street, we have to make some assumptions. Assume a conversation between Snuffy and BB is occurring in front of Oscar’s trash can, and the street continues for another 15 meters (roughly 50 feet) to the right. BB is facing to the right, and Snuffy is looking vaguely left in that passo-aggro no-eye-contact thing he sometimes does.

Suddenly, from the left, a group of human children call out to BB, who turns his back to Snuffy to greet them. Snuffy immediately pivots and steps out of the scene. Less than five seconds later, the kids enter from the left and see only BB.

There are two issues here:

• Snuffy would have been in their line of sight the whole time. The children were facing him as they approached BB. The bird is unusually large, but he is not wide enough to hide Snuffy from view. To see Snuffy, distract BB long enough for Snuffy to get out of view, and then deny Snuffy’s existence is needlessly cruel, uncharacteristic of those who dwell on Sesame Street, and not a positive message to send on kids.
• To go from a motionless standstill to executing a 90-degree turn, crossing the intervening 50 feet, and turning around a corner, all within five seconds, is a physical feat not quite up to Snuff.

To simplify the math, let’s ignore the time spent turning at the beginning and taking a corner at the end (maybe there’s a convenient darkened garage into which Snuffy can disappear). To go from motionless to 50 feet away in five seconds requires a uniform acceleration up to 6 meters per second (about 13.5 mph), or roughly the speed of a road bicycle on a flat, paved surface. Accelerating a 680kg mass to 6 meters per second in five seconds requires a force of 816 Newtons — that same force would accelerate a 200-pound man to 100mph in the same time.

There is nothing about Snuffy’s behavior or physiology that indicates he’s capable of that, even if he stole the Supergrover costume. (Which he could, easily. Grover is an incredible sissy. Grover could be treed by Fozzie.) And if he could, Snuffy at a dead run would sound like someone beating the pavement with Volkswagons.

Responses from the Bad Timing Theory Proponents

Oh, there will be some. If Maria or any of the other Sesame Street Mouthpieces out there (it appears they are legion) want to respond, they are welcome to do it here.

When I mentioned my physics-based objections, Maria said “this is a universe with Muppets in it – their laws of physics are different.” You could almost hear the “you dumbass” at the end. I can only respond “girl, please.” We can bend the rules enough to allow Muppets in the world, but Sesame Street would be a much different place if we said physical objects don’t have mass.

Conclusion

I appreciate the people on Sesame Street communicating via Twitter, but I can’t change physics, logic, and behavioral psychology to support their offhand claims.

Perhaps there is a compromise. Maybe Snuffy never technically became invisible as much as pandimensonal; he stepped away not with a force of 816 Newtons, but into a parallel dimension. Maybe even the same one in which Oscar lives when he’s not perched in his trashcan-shaped portal. (Seriously, how else would he hold all that stuff in a 13-gallon trash can? And what happened to him when the trash men came?) Snuffy wouldn’t be invisible, really, in the same sense that time isn’t invisible. Stephen Hawking really should be a guest on Sesame Street.

Having now conclusively proved that Maria has been wrong for her entire life, I can only assume I will be met tonight with gratitude and respect that befits someone correcting a long-suffering error. Right?