ABSTRACT
In Woody Allen’s film Zelig (1983), the title character has a desire to belong so acute that he physically transforms himself into the likeness of whoever he is with. He soon comes to the attention of a baffled medical establishment, and, through the help of a frenzied press that dubs him ‘the human chameleon’, becomes the biggest celebrity in America. Troops of people are brought to meet him and each time he mimics their appearance, turning into a Rabbi, a 300-pound overeater, an African-American musician, or a Frenchman. While Zelig plays with key American issues, most obviously the immigrant experience and the struggle of assimilation, it also focuses a recurrent theme of comedy: the nature and limits of identity. Leonard Zelig is so shy and selfeffacing that he is pathologically driven to assume the identities of others. This involves not only absurd physical transformations, but also presents an image of failed interiority, of a man who is a reflective surface. Many comic characters might be said to play on our fears of being incomplete humans through their failures of self-awareness or inability to reflect on the nature of experience. Comic characters are traditionally one-dimensional in the sense that they are apparently unable to learn and change. Bugs Bunny, for example, is madly funny, anarchic, transgressive, and dangerous, and completely incapable of reflecting on his actions. Bugs lives in a perpetual series of excitable
nows, changing voice, costume, or tactics within seconds. What makes him funny is the weightlessness of his character, the fact that he is not anchored within an orthodox system of selfhood or responsibility. In Roman New Comedy, character types are so rigidly defined that their behaviours are entirely predictable within given situations. The miser will always be miserly, and the braggart will always boast. In this case, comic identity is derived from a sense of atrophied consciousness. In both examples, human identity is stripped of its subtlety or ambiguity, leaving only monstrous activity. While individual comic characters are infinitely various, it is possible to identify certain features of the categories to which they belong. This chapter will consider the reasoning behind types of comic character, beginning with the most important, distinct personality types.
