Elmo Channels Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly for Halloween

By Daniel Okafor

Elmo is going as Miranda Priestly for Halloween — and the preschool set won't get the joke. "Sesame Street" released a video this week showing its red furry monster dressed as the fashion editor-from-hell that Meryl Streep played in "The Devil Wears Prada."

The bit is pitched squarely at parents. "Guess who Elmo is?" the monster asks before revealing the look: silver wig, sunglasses, an expression of institutional disappointment. It lands, more or less.

How does the sketch play out?

A sentient pumpkin strolls past Elmo, which gives him his cue. "Pumpkins. For fall. How groundbreaking," he says, deadpan, in character as Priestly. Anyone who has seen the 2006 film will recognize the cadence immediately — the flat delivery, the withering pause, the implication that the listener has wasted her time.

Then Cookie Monster appears. Elmo appraises him. "Well, it's not cerulean. But, it works," he snarks, referencing the film's famous monologue about how a cerulean sweater traces back to decisions made in fashion's upper reaches. Cookie Monster's reply: "Uh, thanks? Me think?"

That exchange will fly over the heads of Elmo's actual audience. It was written for the adults in the room, and it knows it.

Who is Miranda Priestly, exactly?

For the uninitiated: Miranda Priestly is the fictional editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, portrayed by Streep in the original 2006 film opposite Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. The movie adapts Lauren Weisberger's novel of the same name. Weisberger once worked at Vogue, and she modeled Miranda on real-life editor Anna Wintour — a lineage the film never troubled to disguise.

The character has staying power. Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Tucci all reprised their roles this year in "The Devil Wears Prada 2," from 20th Century Studios. Nineteen years after the original, the franchise still sells.

Is this Elmo's strangest costume?

Not by his standards. Past "Sesame Street" Halloween segments have dressed Elmo as "Galactic Stan," a spaceman, plus a pirate and a witch. The Priestly turn is odder than those, mostly because it requires a working knowledge of mid-2000s workplace cinema.

There's a symmetry here worth noting. Elmo himself remains a popular Halloween costume for kids and adults alike, so the monster dressing as a movie character closes a loop that runs both directions.

The video is short, the impression is decent, and the cerulean gag is the best joke in it. Whether Wintour has seen it, the source does not say. Sequel season, it seems, now extends to Sesame Street.