Sit a kid in front of a TV for an hour a day and a parent is bound to find something that offends them, other than the fact that plopping impressionable minds in front of a TV unsupervised is considered "good parenting."

Sesame Street is no stranger to controversy. Critics, cynics and crybabies have called out the show on everything from questionable behavior to the ambiguous situations...of puppets. Of course, all of these complaints and cackling criticisms just scratch the surface of a much bigger issue that has largely gone unaddressed: the total loss of our sanity and grasp on reality.

So as we look back at the last 40 years of television's greatest children's show, we see some speed bumps along the way. These are the ones that caused the greatest loss of tire pressure.

5. Grundgetta's "Pox News" joke
Just as Sesame Street was about to celebrate their big 40th, a notable conservative blogger spotted this old clip of Oscar. His girlfriend, Grundgetta, disgusted with the "Trash News Network" announces she's going to watch "Pox News" and exclaims "Now there's a trashy news show." PBS' ombudsman called the show out for making the joke and everyone on the right including their self-appointed culture czar and fellow television puppet Bill O'Reilly jumped all over it.



4. Abby Cadabby
Sesame Street may have many colorful characters on the rosters of puppets, but there's one category that seems strangely short: women. The show corrected this by adding a new character that made up for a 13-year absence by being the most female thing in the history of the universe, short of putting a talking face on a uterus.



3. Kami
Sesame Street is one of the most copied shows in the world. Versions are produced in just about every corner of the globe including in South Africa where 28 percent of the population has HIV. So Takalani Sesame added Kam to their casti, a muppet that suffers from the deadly sexually transmitted disease to educate children on prevention and the affects it has on the human body. Pro-family groups flipped out and some Republicans on Capitol Hill threatened to pull funding from the network.



2. Cookie Monster stops eating cookies?
The world stopped on a dime when it learned that one of Sesame Street's most beloved and iconic characters, the Cookie Monster, had finally gotten that cookie monkey off of his back, kicked his habit and said to a group of strangers, "Hello, me Cookie Monster and me have cookie problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah." Of course, it was just a rumor and has been since he started eating healthy foods and considered cookies a "sometimes food." The rumor got so bad that the Muppet himself had to address the rumors on The Colbert Report because Rachel Maddow could not make room on her show the same night after she booked all four of the Banana Splits.

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1. Bert and Ernie's, um, relationship
It's been rumored since the show first the airwaves in 1969. They live in the same apartment together, sleep in the same room and do just about everything together but never seem to have a wife or a girlfriend. Could it be that they are (gulp) gay? Some thought they were enough of a couple to try and get the show banned. The Sesame Workshop (formerly The Children's Television Workshop) has denied ever implying or designing them as "homosexual Muppets," a two word phrase that makes all of my college journalism professor cry until the whiskey kicks in.