Chaos Priest wrote:I think you may be right. Watching something odd and potentially humiliating happen to somebody trying to maintain dignity in the face of chaos is pretty funny (particularly is he still tries to calmly maintain it afterward), whereas having it happen to somebody who acts like a whipping boy is just kinda sad. I think Krusty the Clown actually explained it fairly well in that episode with Sideshow Bob's brother, Cecil. Elliot may not be the best example of this, but he's probably the closest thing EGS has got to dignified.
Well, him or Susan, but I pity the poor soul who tries inflicting shenanigans upon Susan.
Well... yes and no. Susan does get hit by shenanigans, but they tend to be self-inflicted. There's the episode with her
hair as well as its aftermath
here. There's also her various encounters with
Jeremy. Grace rather innocently puts Susan under the pressure during the
party, whereas Sarah does it quite deliberately
later. Of course there's the famous
arm-wrestling scene with Nanase, and we have Susan the
karaoke star not much later.
A basic rule of thumb for comedy and humour of any sort is that the dignified characters
always get hit hardest. They may not be hit always or even very often, but when they catch it, they always catch it harder than anyone else. Susan is not invulnerable to it and has even deliberately targeted
herself. (Arguably you could claim that this was also what she did with the line 'I stand by my ridiculous claim.') Nonetheless, a large part of Susan's charm is how she manages to hold on to the tattered shreds of her dignity and salvage them for later. She is at least as good a fall guy and straight man as Elliot. (And in fact, they have more than that in common. Susan is, after all, in her own way as much of a defender as Elliot is.)