I assume it means the crazy person has delusions of power, and is disconnected from reality.
But I’ve heard/seen lots of jokes/sketches/cartoons about a guy in a straightjacket who thinks he’s Napolean, and I’ve never heard one where it’s Stalin, Alexander the Great, etc.
I assume part of the answer might be in the oft-discussed insecurities Napolean was said to have felt about his height (and other physical features)?
I’m hoping there’s a relatively objective answer here, but if not, Mods, please move as you see fit.
I shouldn’t have said one-liners – rather, old jokes, probably dating back to the vaudeville era. I haven’t heard many since I was a kid, and I’m 46. Humor can change a lot in forty years.
An example:
Two mental patients are in adjacent cells.
The first patient declares loudly, “I’m Napolean! I’m Napolean! GOD GAVE ME THAT NAME!!!”
The second patient answers, “I did not!”
One of the best-known references I can think of is where Bugs Bunny spends an entire cartoon tangling with (supposedly) the real Napolean, only to have two mental institution orderlies cart him off. “Another Napolean?”, says one orderly. “That’s the third one today”.
These jokes are still alive today. In the excellent video game Psychonauts, there’s a character in a mental institution who thinks he’s Napoleon’s brother, complete with hat and all.
It might have occurred back when Napoleon was contemporary.
The kind of thinking that gets you invited by the white-coated men for a ride to the looney bin often involves eliding the difference between an individual as symbol of what we consider them to stand for and that individual as a specific person. So the characters whose identity gets appropriated are generally larger-than-life figures, or figures very much wrapped up in a highly publicized sequence of events, that everyone (not just mental patients) can see as “standing in” for something other than just themselves.
Donald Trump. Saddam Hussein. Jeffrey Dahmer. Harriet Miers.
And of course the all-time leaders, Jesus Christ, the AntiChrist, and The Devil.
Aside from the distinctive Napoleonic outfit — which is easy to draw in a cartoon, and is instantly recognizable worldwide — you have the advantage that Napoleon was an imperious megalomaniac, almost a little crazy himself. Or at least you can depict him that way without much fear of controversy. Napoleon makes for a good foil in cartoons and other comedies. Just look at Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Also, Napoleon’s exploits are safely in the remote past, relatively speaking. A crazy person thinking he’s Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot wouldn’t be so funny. Instead he would make us squirm a bit in discomfort. You want the character to be merely crazy, not a psychopath.
Napoleon actually was of average stature, or maybe even quite tall by his era’s standarts. The reason why he’s told to be short in the english-speaking world is unclear. Possibly it’s due to his size expressed in french feets and inches (both longer than their british counterparts) being mistaken as british feet and inches. Or maybe it’s just due to contemporary british caricatures. I could dig up his actual size if you really wanted to know it, since I searched for it when I heard for the first time about him being supposedly very small on the english-speaking internet. It was something between 1m 68 and 1m 72, I don’t remember exactly (and I let you convert it in feet/inches).
As for his other physical features, I wouldn’t know (though hasn’t the part of his anatomy we’re refering to been preserved and auctionned some time ago?).
Oh, and by the way, in french jokes and sketches too crazy people believe they’re Napoleon despite the fact that nobody ever heard of him being small and as a consequence insecure. So, I don’t think your guess is correct.
From memory, his height was incorrectly translated as 5’2", but was actually about 5’6" – not exceptionally short for a man born in 1769, but certainly not tall.
I read 30+ years ago in The People’s Almanac about Napoleon’s really small penis being auctioned off, but I later heard that it was uncertain that it was his (which makes intuitive sense to me – how would you have gone about authenticating such a thing in pre-DNA-test 1975?)
Being a mental health professional, I’ve had the chance to spend some time around some “interesting” people. In my experience, it would be unlikely that these individuals would be familiar with who Napoleon was. A more common theme is that they are “agents” of some sort. I have met a few guys who claim that they work for the CIA, or they are some sort of assassins, or they are important members of a local street gang. I’ve met a few people who meowed and barked for a little while, but never anyone who thought they were a famous person.
I remember in my high school intro to psych class, we were told that the most common delusions of grandeur were thinking you were Napoleon or Jesus. Quite a pair.
I once dated a woman who was a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and she had several patients over the years who thought they were Jesus. She also had one who thought he was Elvis, and, interestingly, one who thought he was homeless advocate Mitch Snyder. (Not to impugn the late Mr. Snyder, who certainly did good works, but I’d think even he would be surprised to be included in such company).
No Napoleons, though.
I would agree with you that lots of people today know little or nothing about Napoleon. But I would bet that damn near everybody in 19th century Europe or America had at least heard the name.
Perhaps (to expand on what AHunter3 suggested) at some point between his death and the present, Napoleon was a figure similar to Elvis: an all-powerful, universally-known demigod from the relatively recent past (and a chick magnet to boot)?