Muppet News Flash

English

Etymology

The name of a recurring sketch on The Muppet Show, as Muppet + news flash.

Noun

Muppet News Flash (plural Muppet News Flashes)

1. (informal) Used ironically to introduce a sobering truth.
   • 1999, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, volume 96, Fantasy House, page 151:

     Well, I got a Muppet News Flash for you, pal; it is possible for a three-year-old girl who loves to watch ducks and collect sea shells to feel bad, and then a bit worse, and then a whole helluva lot worse, and finally lousy in a way that requires machines and tubes and pills and catheters and before you know it you’re sitting in the front pew at good ol’ St. Fracis de Sales Church on Granville Street along with your wife and parents and inlaws and X-amount of your balding schoolboy chums listening to some second-rate organist eviscerate Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” […]

   • 2010 December 13, Gary A. Braunbeck, To Each Their Darkness, Smashwords, unpaged:

     Many horror writers cry that it’s the Curse of Categorization that keeps horror trapped in the literary cellar, and readily point to the publishers on whom they are all too willing to lay blame. Here’s a Muppet News Flash: it isn’t only publishers who categorize our fiction; it’s also the readers, the editors, and even (sometimes especially) the writers.

   • 2019 July 23, Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority, Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, Regnery Publishing, unpaged:

     My views are indeed controversial, even among my fellow pro-lifers, who take the general patronizing and pusillanimous position that young women in difficult circumstances are basically indistinguishable from thumb-sucking preschoolers who cannot be treated as whole and competent human beings morally accountable for their actions. Muppet News Flash: I’m an extremist.