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Live Hot Puppet Chat
Overview
Live Hot Puppet Chat gained its initial popularity on a student-run college television station in the Fall of 2005 at the University of California, San Diego, with a series of shows they titled "Season 2". The episodes were written and performed by Tristan Newcomb, and each episode had a different host: they were, in broadcast order, Skiddles, Prickle, Al the Slug, Reducey-Risk Reindeer, Barry Bible, and Dobo Disty. The theme of the show was that, in-between the scripted moments of puppet monologue, the students would telephone from their dorms and try to shock the puppets with as controversial a question as they could manage. The puppets would have varying reactions based upon their uncooperative or incompetent personalities, then lead the callers into conversations that ranged from adult themes to surreal Kafkaesque confrontations, depending on the episode. Some students began to issue complaints with college officials. After episode six, the student-run television station was shut down upon charges of "obscenity", stemming from the blasphemous content of the Barry Bible episode, though there is also evidence that the administration was unhappy with a couple of scattered porn broadcasts on the student channel. This debate between what got the station shut down is now roughly equally divided among those who say it was the porn, which is what the press articles focused upon, and those who say it was the Barry Bible episode, which is the claim of several student council members who dealt directly with the school administration on the controversy.