I mean, isnt this a thing in comedy, where you can make the jokes of the one being funny have more impact by contrasting them with a super serious character? Scrooge is already a normally quite serious character, and the muppets are known for their antics, so leaving the comedy to them and acting serious makes a lot of sense.
Yea, the term is a “straight man” although this is slightly different in that the straight man is usually allowed to acknowledge the antics of the comedic characters, where-as Michael Caine treats the comedy as done straight.
I guess it would be a sub-category of straight man though, not a different thing to itself.
Fans of Brooklyn 99 will recognize Captain Holt as the straight man in the show, which is made hilarious since he is a gay man. He is the gay straight man.
RIP Andre Braugher
Even in season One he was more about being funny because of how “not comedic” he was. And that went out the window fairly fast and he was just as zany as everyone else. Ironically, in a lot of the earlier episodes, Peralta served the role of “the straight man” because the ambient level was so absurd.
A better Braugher example may be House where he mostly existed for House to bounce off of
