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Develop a Friend Puppet

Often when new people come to a church type meeting, they come with some reservations and some walls up. As long as they have walls up in their minds, learning will be hindered. If you hit your message straight and hard right at the beginning, the walls will get higher. People learn better and retain more when they are comfortable or at ease.

One thing we’ve done in our meetings to help make the audience feel more at ease is to use a “friend” puppet. A friend puppet is simply one that comes up and adlibs with the person out front and the audience—most often in a joking and light hearted manner. The puppet can welcome the audience, tell a couple of jokes, sing happy birthday to someone, talk with the emcee about the upcoming program, etc.

We use a large, furry dog named Mugwhump as our friend puppet. Mugwhump is a lovable character, but tends to be a bit mischievous at times. He also lets everyone know that he is the star of the show. When someone takes a picture, he’ll make a comment like: “Normally I charge a dollar for my picture, but since you’re such a good audience, I’ll let that one go.” Or “You caught my bad side, try again on this side.”  He also has a number of corny jokes that he tells.

Mugwhump usually gets quite a few laughs and we’ve found that laughter can help to quickly lower the walls in the minds of the audience. Basically, what he communicates is that we’re going to have a good time today, and in the process you just might learn something.

The next blog post I’ll get into developing a character for your friend puppet.

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