Is there a name for a comic figure who revels in his/her own degeneracy?

[Marley23]

@Sailboat

I guess I’m having trouble defining what traits make up this character you’re trying to define…the suggested examples so far seem to vary more than I expected.

I think he’s describing a type that revels in being a glutton and a lawbreaker, actively malicious, but not in the “take over the world way” - just in a self-aggrandizing, greedy way. The only character mentioned in the OP that I know is Bender - who lies, steals, smokes and abuses people at every opportunity just because he enjoys it. I was going to say he’s an alcoholic, but he needs booze to power his fuel cells, so that shouldn’t count.
If that’s the case I agree that Falstaff is borderline, because he’s a glutton and a rake, but has an actual philosophical worldview and isn’t motivated by malice.

[BrainGlutton]

@Marley23

I think he’s describing a type that revels in being a glutton and a lawbreaker, actively malicious, but not in the “take over the world way” - just in a self-aggrandizing, greedy way.

Well, not necessarily “self-aggrandizing” – a self-aggrandizing character is a vain one, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, who is a Puritan, not a rake.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

Cad is good.

[Martini_Enfield]

@Marley23

Edmund’s just a villainous protagonist, like Richard III but with a better knack for insults.

I’d disagree; he’s really more of a complete bastard. Not actually villainous, per se, but motivated primarily by self-interest, IMHO

[Lumpy]

I think Villa from Blake’s Seven counts: a total cowardly worm, and proud of it.

[Terrifel]

What about “Knave?” Similar to “scoundrel,” but can also connote the “sidekick” or “second banana” comic relief role that these sorts of characters often seem to fulfill. As an added bonus, it’s also a kind of playing card, with all the romantic duplicity that pastime implies.

[jayjay]

Technically, what is the difference between a “cad” and a “bounder”? I always hear characters denounced as “a cad AND a bounder” and I’m wondering if that’s just emphasis or if there’s really a difference.

[Evil_Captor]

@Brainglutton

Is there a name for a comic figure who revels in his/her own degeneracy?

Sure there is: “Moderator.”

Duh.

[Marley23]

@BrainGlutton

Well, not necessarily “self-aggrandizing” – a self-aggrandizing character is a vain one, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, who is a Puritan, not a rake.

As I said, I don’t know some of the characters you mentioned. It’s true of Bender, who thinks he’s amazing and is hard-pressed to go two minutes without saying so.

@Martini Enfield

I’d disagree; he’s really more of a complete bastard. Not actually villainous, per se, but motivated primarily by self-interest, IMHO.

Hmm. He’s willing to harm people, but from what I’ve seen I guess he IS more of a bastard. He’d be a villain if he could, but he can’t seem to get started.

[sinjin]

Is there a name for a comic figure who revels in his/her own degeneracy?

ARISTOCRAT!!!

sorry, couldn’t resist, slinks away…

[Thudlow_Boink]

I assume you’re restricting the category to protagonist=type characters? Because there are plenty of comic villians who revel in their own degeneracy (the Dr. Evil types).

[Annie-Xmas]

Rhett Butler is a good example.

[KneadToKnow]

@Rysto

I’m showing my age(or, better put, my youth) here, but I’m getting a huge amount of cognitive dissonance imagining James Bond saying those lines.

Yeah, that’s your youth showing. Geezers like me wondered, “You kiss Miss Holt with that mouth?”

[gonzomax]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Sp24TlWAM Lisa Lampinelli fits the bill. Note this has LOTS of vulgar language.

[BrainGlutton]

@Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor

Cad is good.

I dunno. A cad can still be a gentleman, at least in the sense of having elegant manners. The kind of character I’m thinking of is generally much cruder, and apparently proud of it.

[msmith537]

Steve Stifler from American Pie?

Pretty much any Will Farrel character - Ron Burgandy, Ricky Bobby, Chazz Michael Michaels, etc.

[The_Scrivener]

A roue [add a diacritical mark over the “e”]? A cheerful vulgarian?

There’s so many delightful varieties of degeneracy… sexual, alcoholic, gluttonous and slothful, as well as perpetual students, those engaged in flim-flammery, insurance defrauders, etc.

Some more movie touchstones: some of the Animal House Delta frat guys, Withnail & I, and Heath Ledger’s Casanova character.

[aldiboronti]

Such characters have a long tradition in English literature and drama. Shakespeare has some wonderful examples:

Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus
Iago in Othello
And, most famously of all, Richard III in the play of the same name, who delights in sharing his evil plans with the audience.

[BrainGlutton]

@aldiboronti

Such characters have a long tradition in English literature and drama. Shakespeare has some wonderful examples:

Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus
Iago in Othello
And, most famously of all, Richard III in the play of the same name, who delights in sharing his evil plans with the audience.

That’s different. Those villainous characters don’t delight in self-indulgence, gluttony, drunkenness, whoring, thieving, etc. They delight in doing evil for evil’s sake.

[BrainGlutton]

Bumping this thread because participating in this thread reminded me of the following highly relevant passage from George Orwell’s 1941 essay, “The Art of Donald McGill” (McGill was a comic-postcard artist):

What they [McGill’s postcards] are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza view of life, the attitude to life that Miss Rebecca West once summed up as ‘extracting as much fun as possible from smacking behinds in basement kitchens’. The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a ‘pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.

But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of literature, in real life, especially in the way society is ordered, his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There is a constant world-wide conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least that he doesn’t matter. Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of flihrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.