Personality
Wearing a baseball cap the wrong way round and with his red hair flopping over his face, Kevin is rude to his despairing parents, frequently shouting "I hate you, I wish I'd never been born!" at them, and insisting that everything is "so unfair!". In one sketch, when his father asks him to wash his car, Kevin ends up taking the entire day to complete the task due to his inability to get out of bed before noon and an apparent allergy to work, and in another sketch, though wide awake, he made the most primitive of attempts at tidying his room when required to do so. The character is also heavily dictated by peer pressure, and was seen in various other sketches trying to sound like Ali G, or Liam Gallagher.
His best friend is another teenaged boy named Perry (played by the actress Kathy Burke, and based on an early character Burke portrayed on various Channel 4 shows). They starred in a 2000 feature film, Kevin & Perry Go Large.
The sketches suggest that teenage boys are always very polite to all parents except their own. Kevin and Perry heap immense amounts of abuse on their own respective parents (though Perry shouts at his down the phone rather than face to face) yet are very polite to each other's parents. In one sketch, Kevin's plans to host a party go wrong and ends with the house being trashed. Despite his frequent declarations of hatred towards his parents, Kevin ends up crying whilst his long-suffering mother gives him a much needed hug.
Aside from playing video games, Kevin's one aim in life is to lose his virginity, or at least to prove that he has a girlfriend. From boasting about the (imagined) joys of sex to placing the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner to his neck to look as though he has received a love bite, he is determined to prove that he has "done it". He eventually does lose his virginity in one sketch during a drunken party. The following morning, he wakes up transformed into a nice, polite and helpful young man, this however does not last.
Read more about this topic: Kevin The Teenager
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understandmy mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arms length.”
—Angela Carter (19401992)
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.”
—Lewis Mumford (18951990)