Bert and Ernie are two Muppet characters who appear together in numerous skits on the PBS/HBO children's television show Sesame Street.

Originated by Frank Oz and Jim Henson, the characters are currently performed by puppeteers Eric Jacobson and Peter Linz.

Bert and Ernie were built by Don Sahlin from a simple design scribbled by Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets.

[1] According to writer Jon Stone, the relationship between Bert and Ernie reflected the real-life friendship between Oz and Henson.

[3] According to A&E's Biography, Bert and Ernie were virtually the only Muppets to appear in the Sesame Street pilot episode, which was screen-tested to a number of families in July 1969.

Physically, Bert represents a human, with yellow skin and a vertically elongated head, with a tuft of black hair at the top.

"[9] However, this is unlikely, as Bert's twin brother Bart is depicted as a traveling salesman who has a son named Brad.

Ernie's performance of "Rubber Duckie," wherein he sings affectionately about his squeaking toy duck and the joy it brings him during bath time, became a modest mainstream hit, reaching No.

Ernie has a characteristic chuckling laugh (a trait he shares with his baby cousin, Ernestine), and he also has his signature pronunciation of the word "again" (ay-gain).

Ernie and Bert introduce a montage of Sesame Street clips in The Muppets: A Celebration of 30 Years.

Ernie sang about his affection for Rubber Duckie in a skit, which aired during the first season of Sesame Street.

The original segment of the song "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon" was one of the rare instances when Ernie's full body was shown.

Jim Henson's original Ernie puppet is on display at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Georgia.

In Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978), Ernie decides to buy Bert a cigar box to store his paper clips in.

At the same time, Bert decides to get Ernie a soap dish to put his Rubber Duckie in, so that it will not keep falling into the tub, but has to trade his paper clips for it.

[14][15][16][17][18] This has repeatedly been denied by Sesame Workshop,[19][20] and some of Bert's interactions with female characters do appear to show that he is attracted to women, like serenading Connie Stevens in the Some Enchanted Evening segment of a first-season episode of The Muppet Show, and recording a song about his girlfriend, "I Want to Hold Your Ear", which was released on several albums.

[21][22][23] In September 2018, Mark Saltzman, one of the script and songwriters for Sesame Street, stated in an interview with Queerty that when he wrote Bert and Ernie, they were often analogues for his own intimate relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman.

Frank Oz later tweeted in September 2018: A last thought: If Jim and I had created Bert and Ernie as gay characters they would be inauthentic, coming from two straight men.

A similar image from another source and featuring Bert conferring with Osama bin Laden was mistakenly included by a Bangladeshi print shop on a series of protest signs in October 2001 and 2002.

Depicting them as a dysfunctional gay couple of petty criminals (Bernie being a promiscuous bisexual), each sketch focused on typically adult themes such as crime, drug abuse, masturbation, and Friday the 13th.

In February 2003, Bernie and Ert were dropped from the series because of legal concerns; however, older episodes circulate on the internet.

However, in a correction for the 1999 "Annual Xmas Quiz" in the San Francisco Chronicle, which made this claim, series writer Jerry Juhl said that the shared names were "purely coincidental".

"[3][43][44] Despite this, the special Elmo Saves Christmas references the rumor, during a scene in which Bert and Ernie walk by a television set, which is playing It's a Wonderful Life.

In the pilot episode of Eerie, Indiana, which aired in 1991, Marshal and Simon are subtly asked for help by a pair of twin brothers named Bertram and Ernest (called Bert and Ernie for short), because their mother has forced them to sleep every night in her Forever Ware containers, thus having kept them at age twelve for over thirty years.

[46] The British soap opera EastEnders has confirmed that characters Bert and Ernie Moon are named after the Muppets.