Jean Teasdale

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean Teasdale is a fictional columnist for the weekly satirical newspaper The Onion.

Jean is a housewife with a superficially bubbly (but shallow) personality and rather kitsch tastes. Her column "A Room of Jean's Own" addresses such banal topics as her love of chocolate, plush toys, and Precious Moments figurines. Another major topic of her columns is husband Richard Teasdale, or "Hubby Rick", to whom she bemoans her childless state. The beer-drinking, NASCAR-loving Rick is nothing like Jean, and in fact routinely mocks his wife. The two were actually forced into marriage by their angry parents, after it was revealed that Jean and Rick had sex, in what Jean cheerfully describes as a "machine gun wedding."

Jean is overweight and rather frumpy in appearance, and it is suggested in her writing that she is not particularly intelligent or educated. She seems to be at least somewhat aware of these shortcomings, however, and often copes with them through self-deprecating humor. Jean has few friends in life other than (she imagines) her readers, whom she often addresses as "Jeanketeers".

She has two cats, Priscilla and Garfield. Her cat Arthur tragically choked to death on a Pinchers the Lobster Beanie Baby. Her middle name is "Meleanne", because her parents didn't know the correct spelling of "Melanie".

In her forty-odd years Jean has held dozens of jobs and been fired from almost all of them, not so much because of willful negligence or disobedience as because of her basic inability to focus on anything besides her own superficial desires long enough to develop a work ethic. For example, in her column "eBay? hOoray!" she describes having been fired from her data entry job at SouthCentral Insurance because she bid on a Mrs. Beasley doll on eBay during work hours using her supervisor's computer, and then lied to her bosses about doing so. Jean's interpretation of this was that her supervisors were punishing her for having the courage to hang onto her childlike sense of wonder even as an adult (i.e. liking Mrs. Beasley) instead of allowing her love of life to be crushed by daily drudgeries (i.e. doing the job for which she was hired.) This episode is a striking example of the ironic dynamic of Jean's columns: after reading them the reader has a more acute sense of Jean's circumstances, relationships, and even attitudes than Jean has herself. The basic pathos of her existence is very clear even though all events are narrated from Jean's ostensibly sunny perspective.