character types

[marycatelli]

It is possible to have a -- comic -- story about a character who blunders from success to success.  Who solves people's problems by accidentally saying the right thing for entirely selfish reasons.  Who accidentally stumbles on solutions to puzzles and finds lost items underfoot.

That has to be the only mode of operation.  Perhaps the character can do something right by intention up front, but then be trapped in a cascade of situations where the comic blundering saves the day.  But having a character flipflop between dumb luck and shrewd -- or even commonsensical -- action breaks the unity of the theme and plot 

Comments

[nodrog]

That's true.  It only works if, like Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China, he's able to think he's being smart because it does, after all, work.  That it did so by sheer dumb luck does not register.

[marycatelli]

He can also be so dumb that he doesn't even bother to think about how it works.

Or possibly doesn't even notice that it does work.

Broad comedy of the Dr. Know-All variety.

[nodrog]

Even I considered the TV show The Girl from UNCLE demeaningly stupid - but it would have been saved and improved if the eponymous main character were a Teela Brown-style “luck child” who survives and succeeds “where a less fantastic man would fail” by virtue of slapstick-ridiculous, utterly ludicrous, invincible good luck.

It would be hard to write episodes for that, tho’ and perhaps it wouldn’t hold up as a series concept:  No danger would be real, because we know she’ll escape.  OTOH, Mission: Impossible never failed either * and that show is (in a sense) still going on!

* Vietnam and the corrupt Federal government worked heavy changes in American society, and reflected even in that show: One of the episodes of the final season had the IMF drive a guy to the brink of insanity trying to get him to incriminate himself… and discovered that they were wrong, and they stepped out of hiding and shamefacedly apologized to the victim!  The recorded Voice of Authority - as America was realizing also - wasn't infallibly correct after all!

[marycatelli]

Sound like I was fortunate to miss that one.

[nodrog]

Yah, Stephanie Powers was cute and easy on the eyes, but they'd have done better to go for the Honey West approach - beautiful, yes, but competent as well.

“Sex was the only weapon Sue Alabama needed, and she could use it like some guys use a blackjack.”

- D Hammett

[marycatelli]

doubly so