What it means
Lighthearted insult for someone being a right idiot or making a pointless mistake. Calling someone a muppet is like saying they’re all fluff and strings, not much going on upstairs. It’s usually cheeky rather than nasty, so you can say it to your mate after they’ve done something daft. Still, tone can make it sting.
Usage examples
"Got all the way to the gig, queued up, then Dan pats his pockets and realises he brought his TV remote instead of his wallet. Absolute muppet."
"Got all the way to the gig at the Roundhouse in Camden on Saturday night of the long weekend, queued up around the block in the pouring rain for forty-five minutes of the November chill, then Dan from the office in Holborn pats his coat pockets at the door of the venue and realises he brought his Sky TV remote instead of his wallet of the laptop bag, absolute muppet of the friendship group."
"The new admin at the office of the legal firm on Chancery Lane sent the confidential client memo of the partner of the Wednesday meeting to the entire mailing list of the firm including the suppliers of the photocopier service of Croydon, came in on Thursday morning with a face the colour of a dishcloth, the senior partner just shook his head over the third coffee of the kitchen and called her a muppet under his breath without any real malice."
Where it comes from
From the brand name Muppet, the felt-and-foam puppet characters created by Jim Henson for Sesame Street in nineteen sixty-nine and the eponymous Muppet Show of the late nineteen seventies, beloved by British television audiences through the BBC and ITV repeats of the eighties. The leap from the lovable but evidently empty-headed puppet character to the affectionate everyday insult for the human friend who has just done something obviously daft occurred in British schoolyard slang of the early eighties, and survives intact today as the universal pub-banter put-down with the same warm cheekiness of the original Henson creations across the entire English-speaking commonwealth.
Other ways to say it
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