I mentioned in my post last night that Steve Urkel from the show Family Matters had come to my mind, of all things.
It was actually in the process of writing the post that this happened. I had written that Pharazon, like Humpty, had fallen and couldn't get back up. As I typed this, I remembered that this was an Urkel tagline. It actually originated, I believe, with a commercial from a US company called LifeCall, which featured old people needing emergency care. In one scene, a woman named Mrs. Fletcher is lying down in the bathroom, and says the (in)famous phrase. Here is the original spot (Mrs. Fletcher is midway through):
The phrase went on to be used in all sorts of things (it was ultimately trademarked by LifeCall), including the show Family Matters as one of Steve Urkel's lines. Here is a compilation with a few examples of him saying it:
It was this that came to my mind as I wrote about both Humpty and Pharazon's fall. It also brought to mind something else that was interesting, and tied directly back to Alice and Humpty Dumpty.
On January 3rd of this year, one of William Tychonievich's blogger friends, Francis Berger, published a post commenting on the appearance of then-president of Harvard, Claudine Gay. It was a very short post showing Gay's face, followed by Stever Urkel's. Berger mentioned that when he first saw Gay, he thought he was looking at Steve Urkel. Here is the post:
https://www.francisberger.com/blog/the-upside-of-not-being-fully-up-to-date-on-the-news-cycle
A commenter by the pseudonym "physiognomycheck" followed up with another Urkel tagline "did I dooo that?", and then proceeds to, from what I can gather from quote they brought in, call Gay ugly.
The interesting thing about this was up until 2 weeks ago, I had never even read or heard the word "physiognomy". So, I was interested to see it here as the name for this commenter - literally only the 2nd time I had seen it in my life within a span of 2 weeks from the first time.
How did I read it the first time? I received an email from someone asking for a photo of another person wanting to know about their physiognomy.
Since I had never heard of the word, I looked it up. The meaning is something like assessing the character, personality, and identify from their appearance, specifically their face. So that made sense, and that was definitely the context the request for the picture was made in.
So when I saw it as the pseudonym for this commenter, I understood the context it was made in. They had adopted the name for the specific comment only in order to go along with their comment: that this person who apparently looked like Urkel had been assessed by this commenter, with their opinion of the ugliness of Gay being part of their 'physiognomy check', or assessment of her.
I am not interested in the private motivations or the actually takeaways of this person's physiognomy check in this post. I am more interested in the fact that this came up in the context of Urkel.
Again, I had written about Humpty and Pharazon both having fallen and not being able to get up, which brought up the imagery of Steve Urkel. In Humpty's interaction with Alice, Alice actually specifically cited her use of physiognomy to identify Humpty, as well as to give her own opinion about how a person might be able to tell if they have ever met someone before:
However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. ‘It can’t be anybody else!’ she said to herself. ‘I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face.’
And:
‘I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet,’ Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; ‘you’re so exactly like other people.’
‘The face is what one goes by, generally,’ Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.
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