You're No Sancho Panza

It’s movie-marketing time, so no real surprise that the (London) Times has a profile up of the world’s favorite cartoon character, Homer Simpson (link). It’s fun in its way, but it has the stink of deadline pressure about it. Either that or the author has never read any one of the great books he cites in his lede. How else to explain a howler like this:

He has a distinguished ancestry. There was Shakespeare’s fat, lying but ultimately fabulous drunkard Sir John Falstaff. There was Sancho Panza, another fat, worldly character, the foil to Cervantes’s crazed Don Quixote. And there was Wilkins Micawber, the hopeless but hopeful spendthrift in Dickens’s David Copperfield. Every age needs its great, consoling failure, its lovable, pretension-free mediocrity. And we have ours in Homer Simpson, the greatest comic creation of our time.

Okay, fat funnymen. I guess, but in every case, I would say that the differences are far more interesting than the similarities. Falstaff, for starters is far wilier and far nastier than Homer—and ends, in a kind of tragedy which Homer, so far, has entirely avoided. Sancho, except for the paunch (=panza?) is unlike him in almost every way. Indeed Homer’s guileless good sense is far closer to Sancho’s companion, the Don, than anything in the squat sidekick. Micawber may be closer—“loveable” enough, but certainly not “pretension-free.” And Micawber is wittier and more imaginative, and for most of his career, far more of a calamity to those so unfortunate to depend upon him.

I suppose you could put together a compare-and-contrast chart here, but it would be pretty complex. Crafty: Sancho and Falstaff, but not Micawber and certainly not Homer. Saintly idiots: Homer and Micawber (and Don Quixote?) but not Sancho or Falstaff. Pungent wit: Falstaff and Micawber and Sancho but not Homer. I think I’m talkin’ “dissertation” here, but certainly not something you can blow off in 322 words (word count: 322).