Steve Martin’s banjo was more than a stage prop — he was is a solid Scruggs picker who rubbed shoulders with some of the greats. He reminisced rather, rather eloquently, about crossing paths with Doug Dillard in the cat-poem-free literary magazine The Oxford American:

The Dillards boasted the fastest and most thrilling banjoist alive, Doug Dillard. They played live in Orange County in those days, and watching Doug Dillard was like watching God, if God were a finger-picking madman. Doug, thin as a rail, had a grin that Lewis Carroll could describe, like a piano keyboard stuck on the end of a reed. But the sound of the banjo accelerating from zero to sixty in a nanosecond, in a town that had heretofore heard only the lazy folk guitar, made us freeze. Doug was generous, too, and he would teach us various licks (slang for finger and chord sequences).

So here the erstwhile Gern Blanston applies what he learned, dueling with the Muppets.