Charm by Joseph Epstein

Author:Joseph Epstein [Epstein, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2018-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter IX

Vulgar Charmers

One tends to think of the charming as suave, urbane, refined, elegant, worthy not only of admiration but, the perhaps far-fetched hope is, of emulation. Not all charmers fit this description. Some approximate near the reverse, and yet are still charming, though not of course to everyone. Such is the multifacetedness of charm that a small number of people who could not care less about being charming, set out even to be the reverse of charming, nevertheless turn out to be so.

These are the vulgar charmers. What makes them vulgar is their lack of interest in good taste. Taste itself, the very idea of it, would seem not to exist for them. I write “would seem,” but of course it just doesn’t, flat-out. Good taste exists for them only to travesty, to violate, to outrage. If traditionally charming people can be counted upon to exhibit good taste, the vulgar charmers can equally be counted on to mock and execrate it.

Good taste, after all, is a construct, and far from a permanent one. Anyone who thinks it is permanent should be reminded that at Versailles, at the court of Louis XIV, the great Sun King defecated behind a screen with his courtiers standing about, certain among them designated to hold his bowl, others to clean him up afterward. Acceptable good taste, in other words, can change radically, has its limits, and is sometimes worth debunking if done in an amusing way. Making bad taste amusing is one of the things the vulgar charmers do. The pleasure they provide derives from watching standard good conduct ignored, decorum trashed. Not, this, to be sure, everybody’s idea of a good time, but for many of us somehow charming nonetheless.

The first vulgar charmer, a character not from real life but from literature, is Falstaff, fat, sensual, a drinking man, bawdy, a small-time swindler, cowardly, witty, and withal winning. So irresistible is he that Shakespeare used him in three different plays, and Verdi brought him front and center from supporting actor to be the main and eponymous subject of his opera Falstaff. In Shakespeare, when Prince Hal ascends to be king, it is understood he must reject Falstaff, putting him aside, as Corinthians instructs when we grow older we ought to put aside childish things, but not without regrets. No one in real life would want to be Falstaff, but so long as he is on stage, neither, such is his charm, does anyone wish him to leave.

Returning from literature and from the seventeenth century to today, consider the comedian and movie director Mel Brooks, whose immensely successful career has been built on cleverly exhibiting bad taste. Brooks has made comic movies joking about the Nazis (The Producers), hunchbacks (Young Frankenstein), flatulent and racists cowboys (Blazing Saddles), bird-droppings (High Anxiety), and gay men in Sherwood Forest (Men in Tights). He has operated as if etiquette were of no concern, political correctness did not exist, good taste laughable—and got away with it. He makes

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