There’s a specific look that people get when they see Lamb Chop, the beloved sock puppet originally voiced by Shari Lewis that’s been entertaining children across generations for nearly 70 years.
Mallory Lewis, Shari’s daughter who took over puppeteer and ventriloquist duties for Lamb Chop after her mother’s death in 1998, knows the look well.
“I call it The Lamb Chop Face,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Portugal. Imagine if you gasp with glee and your face froze wide-eyed and mouth agape in a huge smile for several seconds before melting into a booming “aww.”
She then reaches out of frame for several seconds before returning with Lamb Chop herself on her right hand. I obviously react just as Lewis predicted.
“See, you made the face!” Lamb Chop says, the cooing voice the same as it was when I watched Lamb Chop’s Play-Along as a kid in the ’90s, which was the same it was decades earlier when The Shari Lewis Show debuted in 1960. “He made the face!”
Lewis and, by extension, the adorable, sassy little puppet have been seeing the face more often recently: “Did you see my movie?” Lamb Chop asks, getting down to business.
Lewis, Lamb Chop, and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Lisa D’Apolito (Love, Gilda) have been gearing up for this weekend’s release of Shari & Lamb Chop, a new documentary about the trailblazing career of Shari Lewis and her lasting legacy, with Lamb Chop still, today, a major pop-culture star. “Don’t you think the movie should have been called Lamb Chop & Shari?” the puppet cheekily asks. To wit, at age 69, Lamb Chop was just crowned America’s Hottest Dog Toy in The New York Times.
Shari Lewis’ rise in children’s programming and family variety television predated Fred Rogers and Jim Henson, with Lamb Chop as an appendage through it all as she and her cast of quirky puppet co-stars crusaded for kindness, inclusion, and dignity for their young audiences. When Lewis spoke in Congress to campaign for protections for children’s television, she got Lamb Chop permission to speak.
D’Apolito is visibly tickled remembering a trip to New York City’s Museum of the City of New York for a photo shoot with Mallory and Lamb Chop. “We went all over the city, and people were stopping traffic to run over and see Lamb Chop,” she says. “There were adults who were strolling with their kids, who would abandon their kids on the sidewalk to get a picture with Lamb Chop.”
“The cops were really funny,” Lewis adds. “Oh man. And in New York, you know, they wear those huge guns. And yet, they were like, ‘Lamb Chop!’”
There is something clearly cross-generational about the appeal of Lewis and her style of performance—and, of course, Lamb Chop—that may be entirely unique in the world of entertainment. “I am 100 percent authentically who I am,” Lamb Chop says, nodding her head. “And that’s why we have half a million social media followers. 300,000 on TikTok!”
Yes, it’s 2025. Lamb Chop is on TikTok.
The mission of Shari & Lamb Chop the film, then, is to get to the heart of Lewis and what it was that’s made her legacy, like the iconic, perhaps infamously interminable earworm of a song made famous in PBS’s Lamb Chop’s Play-Along, never ending.
***
Shari Lewis grew up in the Bronx with a supportive, proudly feminist mother and a father who was named New York City’s “official magician” by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. As such, Lewis was surrounded by illusionists, puppeteers, and ventriloquists, all of whom taught her tricks of their trades while she was young.
“I started researching Shari and one of the first things I came across was her father’s obituary [and the news he was New York’s official magician]. I was like, is this really true?” D’Apolito remembers.
After several years hustling as a variety performer and ventriloquist, Lewis was given her first network program, The Shari Lewis Show, by NBC when she was 27. A career of ups and downs—her show’s cancellation, an attempt to break out as a serious actress, and a triumphant comeback in the ’90s on PBS—was, as portrayed in Shari & Lamb Chop, most defined by Lewis’ indefatigable tenacity and spunk.
“It’s a story about the whole person, Shari Lewis, not just the little lady and overalls that you watched on the box in your living room,” Mallory says.
You might be surprised to learn, for example, that Shari Lewis appeared on the series Playboy After Dark—and so did Lamb Chop, outfitted like a Playboy Bunny. “You’re far too young to be a bunny,” Shari tells the puppet. Lamb Chop laughs: “Shari, you still see me as a child, but to millions of hot-blooded American men, I’m a three-page foldout.”
In fact, Lewis had a whole night club act that she’d perform where Lamb Chop is drunk, a tradition that Mallory now continues—though she’s shocked at how controversial it is to some fans.
“I only do Lamb Chop drunk at 21 and over clubs,” Mallory says. “Like, I’m not gonna do drunk Lamb Chop for a 4-year-old. First of all, they wouldn’t get the jokes. This woman comes up to me and she goes, ‘Your mother would be horrified by that routine.’ And I looked at her and I’m like, ‘My mother wrote that routine.’”
Lewis loved to tell dirty jokes, Mallory says. She also loved to eat lamb: “The family joke is that ‘lamb has been feeding our family for years,’” she says. “She loved to order lamb in a restaurant just to freak people out.”
It’s remarkable to look at Lewis’ professional biography and see the years in which she was totally in charge of her own TV programming, as the face, name, and talent of the show, but also behind the scenes. This was the ’50s and ’60s when she was breaking out in a major way.
“Her and Lucille Ball were probably the only women at the time who had full control,” D’Apolito says. “Shari had total control over who was going to write on the show, who was going to be on the show, the finances. So she was really in charge of everything.”
One of Mallory’s favorite anecdotes in the film is when a producer on one of Lewis’ sets recounts when he asked, “Where’s the power in the studio?” Lewis raised her arm, pointed at herself, and bellowed, “Right here!” He, of course, was referring to the electrical power in the studio. But it’s emblematic of Lewis’ dynamism.
“She had to fight to stay relevant, and she had to fight for respect,” Mallory says. “But nobody made the mistake of f---ing with her twice.”
When the whole process of the movie began, Mallory gave D’Apolito access to Lewis’ personal archives, housed in a shipping container on the hillside of her property in Malibu. She set up a pop-up tent and folding table for D’Apolito and said, “Have at it.” The thought of joining the director in the dig through the treasure trove seemed overwhelming, and hot: “I’ll be in the nice, clean, air-conditioned home.”
After some time passed, however, D’Apolito called her concerned and asked for her help. “She goes, can you find me somebody who will say anything other than ‘Shari Lewis was the hardest-working, most focused person on the planet?’ I’m like, ‘Well…maybe someone who hasn’t met her?’”
