Zachary Scott for The New York Times

Quick: Name three things Kermit the Frog and Kurt Cobain have in common.

They both wear a nappy green sweater.

They both have a tempestuous relationship with a buxom blonde who is as off-kilter emotionally as she is off-key musically.

And they both swing a left-handed ax.

Kermit’s sinistrality leapt right off the page at me as soon as I saw the photograph of him with Bret McKenzie that accompanies Adam Sternbergh’s feature in this week’s magazine. Somehow, I had never taken notice of it before. And, lo, right there on the magazine’s index page, is the Muppet house band, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, which includes two more left-handed guitarists, Janis and Floyd.

It’s funny; I had never thought of Muppets as necessarily having physiological human qualities, like a dominant hand, even though I have long known that they possess a deeper sense of humanity than most humans. (I mean, clearly the Muppets have souls; but do they have soles?) Truly Kermit and friends were created in the image of their left-handed maker, Jim Henson: Grover, your furry, adorable waiter, carries his tray in his left hand, and Ernie squeezes his rubber duckie with his left hand. Miss Piggy daintily smooths her hair and delivers devastating karate chops with the same left hand. It can only be assumed that Gonzo, playing a plumber in “The Muppet Movie,” worked with a left-handed monkey wrench.

So, as generally only 10 percent of the human population is left-handed, why are there so many left-handed Muppets? (Elmo, it should be noted, plays the guitar righty.) What is the significance of a still-confounding trait that has a history of superstitious connotations of criminality and evil, even so far as to insinuate dealings with the devil? Was Henson subtly fighting back against the discrimination against all the young lefties who had to sit at right-handed desks and cut with right-handed scissors? Those specialized lefty scissors even bore a mark of shame: the green plastic coating around the handle. It’s not easy being green.

In Kermit’s case, however, the answer is more functional than ideological, which is a little disappointing, like when you learn that the gargoyles are really just drain spouts. Because Henson would work underneath the puppet, he would use his right hand for the head and his left hand to control the mobile left arm. (The right arms often have limited mobility and sometimes are even pinned to the puppet’s body.)

As Sternbergh’s article on Bret McKenzie notes, making music for the Muppets is no easy task. It requires not only appealing to the audience that will hear it, but it also has to fit the spiritual core and specialized self-awareness of the Muppets themselves. For example, in “The Muppet Movie,” Rowlf the Dog makes a child-bearing reference to Kermit about “the pitter-patter of toes, the little feet of tadpoles.” Yet for the forthcoming movie “The Muppets,” McKenzie was not permitted to have Kermit make a reference to once being a small piece of felt. It’s a fine line between acknowledging that Kermit once was a tadpole, which he never was, and acknowledging that he was once a piece of felt, which he, if you think about it, really once was.

I love Muppet music. I love their originals, I love their covers, I love when people cover them. (Try Jane Krakowski’s version of “Rubber Duckie” or Karen Carpenter’s “Rainbow Connection.”)

Of course, YouTube is awash in Muppet videos of all kinds, from a bouncy, pun-filled ragtime Muppet original like “I Hope That Something Better Comes Along” to Muppets paying homage to the greats, like Floyd’s very sweet version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” to other bands’ songs being dubbed over Muppets, like this cleverly edited video of Phish’s “Back on the Train.” And here is Andrew Bird singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” in French and English.

One of the best, however, comes from OK Go, a band that was featured in the magazine’s Look column this summer. Their imaginative video-making dovetails perfectly with the Muppets, for whom imagination is a cardinal virtue. Here is their brilliant collaboration on the Muppet theme song (note how awkward it is for the left-handed Muppets to control the right-handed band at around the 2:15 mark):