What Is Frasier?

Previously: Niles Crane is…

Frasier is Donkey Kong: the suave brute, the shirtless intellectual, the head of the family whose relatives are ever being scattered to the winds at the hands of his many enemies, the hugely broken paterfamilias, the incoherent charismatic, the sick doctor, the bewildered Professor, the weakest Big Man on Campus, the missing Marx Father, a roaring King Kong buzzed by ineffectual planes, mental despoiler of Fays Wray, failed grasper of his own ends, eternally slipping on the banana, peeled; the Ghost of Christmas Present & Ruined; a feverish Marcus Aurelius dodging death; a gladiator gone to seed; the fugue and the fugue state; the state; eater of bog bodies; seed-spiller, Ceres-pillager; a Viking in loafers, a beast in a tie; Tony Soprano funneled through grad school and a slightly-increased finesse for disavowing his own obvious anger.

Frasier is the open mouth, the pause before the roar, the leak in the balloon, the guard of the Princes in the Tower, the chains binding Marley, the deluge after Louis, the circus strongman and barker both, the missing stair, the dripping sea-God lashing jealously after Odysseus, Odysseus tearing his bed out of the floor to get a rise out of Penelope, Audrey II, Bluto, the net-fighting retiarius.

(Niles is Dido turning haughtily away in Hell, Olive Oyl, Adriana La Cerva.)