Mr. Grinch

Who is Mr. Grinch?

The Grinch is a fictional character created by Dr. Seuss. He is best known as the main character of the children's book How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957). He has been played/voiced by many different actors, including: Boris Karloff, Hans Conried, Bob Holt, Anthony Asbury, Jim Carrey, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Grinch is depicted as a hairy, pot-bellied, pear-shaped, snub-nosed creature with a cat-like face and cynical personality. In full-color adaptations, he is typically colored avocado green. He has spent the past 53 years living in seclusion on a cliff, overlooking the town of Whoville.

In contrast to the cheerful Whos, the Grinch is misanthropic and mean-tempered. The reason for this is a source of speculation; the consensus among the Whos is that he was born with a heart that is "two sizes too small". He especially hates the Christmas season, making particular note of how disturbing the various noises of Christmas time are to him, including the singing of Christmas carols. Unable to stand the holiday any longer, he decides to destroy it once and for all.

Aided by his pet dog, Max, he disguises himself as Santa Claus and breaks into the Whos' homes to steal everything they own and dump it off a nearby mountain. Although he pulls off the theft successfully, on Christmas morning, he is shocked to hear the Whos still singing cheerfully, happy simply to have each other. He then realizes that the holiday has a deeper meaning that he never considered. Inspired, he stops the Whos' belongings from falling off the edge of the mountain, and in the process (according to those who speculated upon the size of his heart before) his heart grows three sizes. He returns all the gifts he stole and gladly takes part in the Whos' Christmas celebration.

The Grinch is still portrayed as a bitter and ill-tempered character in artwork or other media. In both the animated TV special and the 2000 live-action film, he is shown to have superhuman strength when he stops an entire sleigh loaded with presents from going over a cliff and lifts it over his head, and he is also described as "[finding] the strength of ten Grinches plus two" (a phrase lifted from the original book) during that moment of crisis. In the 2018 film, the Grinch has assistance saving all the Whos' stolen goods.

With the character's anti-Christmas spirit followed by the transformation on Christmas morning, scholars have noted similarity to Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Cardiologist David Kass suggested that the rapid growth of the Grinch's heart at the end of the story indicates that the Grinch has the physiology of a Burmese python.

In the 2000 adaptation, when he was a baby, his first sign of hating Christmas was at birth; abandoned in Whoville, he landed outside a "Christmas party" (in reality a key party—something that did not yet exist at the time Seuss wrote the book) and was left out in the cold when none of the revelers inside noticed him. When he was taken in he showed violence to the holiday, mostly biting off the head of a Santa plate and drawing violence to him when he was in school. He falls for a Who-girl named Martha, when a large boy bullies him for being different and telling him he already has a beard, which only fuels his determination to make the greatest gift using family heirlooms, a tiny gramophone and a colander and throwing them into a very hot cooking pot. When he returns to school for the gift exchange with a bag on his head, the Grinch is bullied again, this time by the boy about his gift and the bag on his head, to which the teacher tells Grinch to take it off, revealing his futile attempts to shave his face, which causes the whole class, especially the teacher to laugh. This causes the Grinch to lose his temper, resulting in him throwing his gift at a pile of presents, picking up the tree and throwing it, yelling of his hatred for Christmas. The film thus provides a backstory for the Grinch's resentment toward the holiday and the Whos, though Seuss himself simply explained it away as "no one quite knows the reason" in the book. The TV special The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat posits that the death of the Grinch's mother may have also increased his grief and eliminated a positive influence on his life.