Character
Sid and his mates Baz, Bob and Joe, who are all Geordies, spend much of their time hanging around at the pub, with Sid bragging to them continually about his apparent sexual prowess. He is in fact still a virgin and each strip centres around his never-ending desperate struggle to try and lose his virginity. He is a coarse and unsophisticated 30 year-old who still lives with his mother, a fact which often poses as a stumbling block to any potential liaison, and is unable or unwilling to use any kind of decorum when approaching women, instead using outrageously crude lines that never succeed in achieving anything beyond rejection or a violent response from the woman in question. In one of his most famous examples from an early issue of Viz, Sid approaches a woman with; 'How, pet, my name's Sid. D'ya fancy a fuck?' When answered with a definite 'No!', he continues: 'Well, would you mind lying down while I have one?'
The recurrent format of Sid's adventures is that he believes he has found a new approach to women that will secure him a sexual conquest at long last ('This time... this time! It HAS to be this time!!'). His attempts at trying out these questionable methods invariably end up with him being humiliated, often painfully. He is physically very unfit, has a prominent beer belly, drinks heavily, always has a cigarette in his mouth and is cowardly despite his macho pretensions, always coming off the worse in a fight. He is also in denial: despite the misfortunes that befall him he continues to display a blind faith in his crude attitude towards women and, when rejected, often tries to pass the blame for his failures on to the woman in question or somebody else. His exploits have also unintentionally led to several homosexual encounters, which ironically reveal his homophobia or, perhaps, latent homosexuality.
Sid seems under-educated and knows little of the world outside Newcastle. It is even claimed at one point that he is unable to read. It is not clear what his job is, if indeed he has one at all, although he has been seen doing occasional odd jobs as part of his various schemes to pick up women. In another strip he attempts to pick up a woman by telling her that he works as 'an assistant to a well-established provider of goods to the younger end of the market'; despite being exposed as an elf in Santa's grotto in a local department store' by his derisive mates, he still attempts to keep up the pretence that his job brings him success with women--'Y'see lasses fancy summat a bit special'. Although Sid's three companions do sometimes succeed with women, they are much like him in their yobbish, misogynistic, homophobic and racist outlook, never marry or expand their stagnant social circle.
Read more about this topic: Sid The Sexist
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves.”
—Alice Miller (20th century)
“We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery—by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press—their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)