“Where have you guys been?"

That’s it. That’s the line. In the 2011 Muppets movie, after years of the theater sitting empty, after everyone scattered to the winds, after the world moved on — Beauregard is just… there. Sweeping. Waiting. And when the gang finally returns, his only question is where they went.

Who Is Beauregard?

Beauregard is the janitor at the Muppet Theater. Performed by Dave Goelz since 1980, he’s a large, shaggy, sweet-faced creature of indeterminate species who takes his job very seriously despite understanding approximately none of it. He’s not dumb, exactly — he’s just operating on a different frequency than the rest of reality. He’ll mop a floor into a lake. He’ll sweep a pile of dust into a larger pile of dust. He’ll offer to help and somehow make everything exponentially worse while remaining the most earnest soul in the building.

He is, in the parlance of our times, a good boy.

Why Beauregard Matters

I think about Beauregard more than is probably healthy.

There’s something about his particular brand of loyalty that hits different as you get older. He’s not flashy. He doesn’t have Gonzo’s daredevil charisma or Fozzie’s desperate need to be loved or Animal’s unhinged id energy. Beauregard just… shows up. Every day. Mop in hand. Ready to do his job badly but with his whole heart.

And here’s the thing — nobody asked him to stay. The theater was empty. The lights were off. Kermit was in his swamp, Miss Piggy was doing whatever Miss Piggy does, and Beauregard was just there, maintaining a building that nobody was using, for an audience that wasn’t coming.

That’s not stupidity. That’s faith.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the people who stay. The ones who keep showing up even when the spotlight’s gone dark, even when nobody’s watching, even when the rational thing would be to move on. Beauregard didn’t know if anyone was coming back. He just knew where he was supposed to be.

There’s a version of that in all of us, I think — or at least there should be. The part that keeps sweeping even when the theater’s empty. The part that asks “where have you guys been?” instead of “why did you leave?”

No accusation. No bitterness. Just genuine confusion, because of course he stayed. Where else would he be?

The Unhinged Analysis

Let me be clear: Beauregard is the most important Muppet, and I will defend this position with the intensity of a graduate thesis committee that has gone feral.

Consider: In a cast of characters defined by their desperate pursuit of something — fame, love, art, chickens — Beauregard wants nothing. He has achieved a state of pure being that Buddhist monks spend lifetimes chasing. He is fully present, fully content, fully committed to the bit. The bit is mopping. The mopping is eternal.

Beauregard is not a janitor. Beauregard is a koan. He is the answer to the question “what would it look like to be exactly where you’re supposed to be, doing exactly what you’re supposed to do, without ever questioning whether any of it matters?”

It looks like a big fuzzy guy with a mop, wondering why everyone else keeps leaving.

Stay sweeping, Beauregard. We could all learn something.

This is the first installment of Muppet of the Week, a series where I write about felt creatures with more emotional depth than most prestige TV characters.