David Lazer, who as an IBM executive in the mid-1960s hired Jim Henson’s Muppets to star in a series of short films that injected laughs into sales meetings — and who a decade later joined Mr. Henson’s company as a producer — died on April 10 at his home in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 89.
His death, which had not been widely reported, was confirmed by Doyle Newberry, a manager of Mr. Lazer’s estate. He did not cite a cause.
“What David brought to the company was class,” Brian Henson, Mr. Henson’s son and the chairman of the Jim Henson Company, said in an interview. “Even my dad would say you couldn’t call Muppets Inc. classy. Up until then, it was a bunch of beatniks making weird stuff.”
In 1965, Mr. Lazer was making commercials and sales training films for IBM’s office products division and had learned the importance of keeping in-house audiences at the company interested during meetings. Intrigued by a reel of commercials and short films made by Mr. Henson, Mr. Lazer wanted to bring his “sense of humor and crazy nuttiness” to IBM, he told Brian Jay Jones for his book “Jim Henson: The Biography” (2013).
The star of Mr. Henson’s early films for IBM was Rowlf the Dog, who typed letters to his mother on a series of IBM manual and electric typewriters in which he described his new career as a salesman for the company. He promoted real products; he also plugged an electric guitar from IBM’s “Hippie Products Division” that, improbably, dispensed coffee.
In another short, an early version of Cookie Monster devoured a talking coffee machine.
“The idea is that if you can give people a good laugh, they’ll listen better,” Mr. Lazer told The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1985.
Under Mr. Lazer’s leadership, the films intended for IBM audiences led to a broader business, Muppet Meeting Films. Companies bought the videos to motivate their employees — or at least keep them awake.
One of those films features an executive-type Muppet delivering a motivational speech, in which he calmly praises the company as a family of “honest men.” But his tone grows more urgent, and his gestures become wilder, as he gets to his point: “I ask you to remember just one word, the one word that makes it all possible, and that word is sell! I want you to get out there and sell, sell, sell! I want you to sell your socks off!”
Mr. Lazer’s skills as an executive appealed to Mr. Henson, who asked him to join what was then called Henson Associates (and is now the Jim Henson Company) in 1975.
Quoted in Mr. Jones’s book, Mr. Lazer recalled that he was shocked by Mr. Henson’s offer and responded by saying: “Oh my God! Oh, probably!” Three weeks later, he took the job.
“Lazer was determined to bring the same polish to Henson Associates that he had brought to the IBM product line,” Mr. Jones wrote, “and as far as Lazer was concerned, the product at Henson Associates wasn’t the Muppets; it was Jim.”
Brian Henson said that Mr. Lazer instituted one change very quickly; he didn’t want his father slipping into a cumbersome Muppet costume again after the last one, a towering, hairy ogre named Sweetums.
“He said, ‘Jim, you’re never getting into a costume again,’” Mr. Henson said. “‘You can work hand puppets, but you’re never getting into a costume with a T-shirt and shorts again.’”
David Lazer was born on Jan. 23, 1936, in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx and in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, George, was a haberdasher, and his mother, Cilla (Schneweis) Lazer, a Polish immigrant, managed the home. David became adept at photography as a teenager and won awards for his photographs in high school.
He joined IBM after high school in 1954 and, after serving for two years in the Army, where he received intelligence training, returned to IBM. He studied film at night at New York University.
At Henson Associates, Mr. Lazer was a producer or executive producer of “The Muppet Show,” the television variety series that ran from 1976 to 1981 and won four Primetime Emmy Awards; the films “The Muppet Movie” (1979), “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981), “The Dark Crystal” (1982), “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (1984) and “Labyrinth” (1986); and a 1979 TV special, “The Muppets Go Hollywood.”
Mr. Lazer’s corporeal image — curly hair, bushy eyebrows, well-tailored suit, tan — inspired the creation of a Muppet look-alike for some of the meeting films. In several of them, the David Lazer Muppet played a self-important businessman; in another, he portrayed one of three executives giving quarterly reports while stranded on an island. The Lazer Muppet reported rising coconut production and steady sand castle production.
As a human, Mr. Lazer made a cameo appearance in “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” squiring Liza Minnelli into Sardi’s, the famous theater-district restaurant, where she found that her caricature on a wall has been replaced by Kermit the Frog’s.
Mr. Lazer played a critical role at the company after Jim Henson died in 1990. By then, Mr. Lazer had left his longtime position as executive vice president and, for a year or two, served as an adviser. To help the Henson family, he returned, as the company’s acting president.
“During that period he was very much like a father figure to me,” Brian Henson said. “My father was my mentor in puppetry, animatronics and directing puppets, but David was my mentor in terms of running the business.”
After Brian Henson was named president in early 1991, Mr. Lazer became vice chairman, a post he held until his retirement in 1994. Mr. Henson is now the chairman.
Mr. Lazer is survived by a sister, Ann Lazer Harstack.
At his first staff meeting at the Henson company, Mr. Jones wrote, Mr. Lazer baffled the Muppet designers and performers with a slew of flow charts and other paperwork.
People were laughing at him. To them, he was a suit.
So he tossed his papers onto the table and kept talking as if there had been no snickers about his IBM-style presentation.
“It’s not the same, is it?” Jim Henson said to him after the meeting, referring to the looser atmosphere in the world of Muppets.
“Oh no,” Mr. Lazer said. “It’s better.”
