Do we like them?

Do we like Marc Weiner?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy surfaced and the empathy work is real good, but the coverage is old and sparse, so we can't say more.

Marc Weiner is the bloke behind Weinerville, the Nickelodeon show where a grown man's real head sat on a tiny puppet body. He came up through stand-up in the 1980s and his puppet boxing matches got him a spot on Saturday Night Live. Kids of the 90s know him; so do Dora fans, because he voiced Swiper the fox and the talking Map.

The big turn in his story is faith. He became religiously observant after joining a synagogue in New York and later wrote a comedy act about being a newly Orthodox Jew. Faith alone is never a fail on this page, and nothing in what we read suggests he uses his for anything but good.

On the harm check, we searched his name against LGBTQ+ and trans issues, vaccines, climate, immigration and Trump, and came up empty. No rants, no conspiracy slide, no culture-war grifting turned up. We also found no sign he has been working with anyone who pushes harm. That's a clean sheet, but we'll be honest: it's a thin one, because most of the coverage we could read is old.

His main project since the mid-2000s is the Empathy Labyrinth, a workshop built on Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication. JTA reported that he ran sessions in 2007 for Arab and Jewish teachers in Israel, working with Israel's Ministry of Education. Whatever you think of the politics around that, the aim was cooling conflict, not feeding it.

As for scandals, we found none: no convictions, no lawsuits against him and no credible allegations. The only whiff was a user-edited TV listing about a Spanish show complaining about the Weinerville name, and that's not news, so we're leaving it out. In his 2012 Kveller interview he comes across as dry and self-deprecating, saying he doesn't think being Jewish has anything to do with being funny.

So: a gentle, funny bloke whose public record is mostly about getting people to listen to each other. We'd happily say yes, with the caveat that there isn't much recent reporting to check. If something new turns up, this one gets a re-read.