Town drunk

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The depraved inhabitants of a tavern, from a nineteenth-century temperance play.

The town drunk (also called a tavern fool) is a

drunk more often than sober
.

Uses in fiction

In fiction, the town drunk character serves a number of functions.

The town drunk may serve merely as a

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is another famous example. In modern fiction, which tends to reflect the contemporary influences of the sobriety movement, the town drunk may get sober and set about revitalizing his life.[2]

The town drunk may play the role of the

Shakespeare's Macbeth, the Porter who appears in Act II, Scene 3, is also a type of "comic relief" drunk who serves to temporarily lighten the mood of the play right after a heinous regicide
has taken place.

As if to underscore the cliche of such a character, the TV series

F-Troop
had an otherwise-useless character, Charlie the Town Drunk. Captain Parmenter said "We were lucky to get him. Dodge City had a spare."

In a similar vein, the town drunk may serve as a

Henry IV and in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Another would be the drunk who appears in Team America: World Police at the low point of the film, where his drunken ramblings inspire the hero to save the world. In the 1722 Danish play Jeppe on the Hill, the eponymous wise fool
main character, declares that "everybody says that Jeppe drinks, but nobody asks why Jeppe drinks".

Frank Gallagher from the TV series Shameless
is a quintessential town drunk and rarely appears in the series without being intoxicated.

References

  1. ^ Walter J. Engler, "A Project on Our Town for Communication Classes", College English, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Dec., 1952), pp. 150–156
  2. ^ John E. Richters and Dante Cicchetti, "Mark Twain Meets DSM-III-R: Conduct Disorder, Development, and the Concept of Harmful Dysfunction", in Development and Psychopathology 5 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 5–29
  3. ^ P. F. Murphy, "Living by His Wits: The Buffoon and Male Survival", in Signs 2006 vol 31, num. 4, pp. 1125–1142.
  4. PMID 16227064
    .
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