He is the Jewish uncle who asks his unsuspecting nephew to pull his finger, a veritable Borscht-belt character.
No, it does not degrade Mr Grass as a fabulist of burlesque events, a veritable bestiary of characters: "Cat and Mouse", "The Flounder", "From the Diary of a Snail", "Dog Years".
Played to exuberant perfection by Kemper (seriously, that smile), here is an implacably good and unfailingly positive character, a veritable bonbon of a babywoman with a wardrobe that wouldn't look out of place on a CBeebies presenter, who should be really annoying but instead is wonderful.
His average show has a veritable horde of secondary characters, all, typically, venal and self-seeking: the seventy deadly sins.
And so to a seaside guesthouse for some truly Christie sleuthing as a veritable Cleudo board of characters lines up as the potential Russian spy.
Twenty-two characters — a veritable population explosion for a Broadway play — pass in and out of the Carneys' rustic County Armagh farmhouse in the momentous summer of 1981, when the Troubles between Northern Ireland's Catholics and Protestants are at full throttle, and the extended family is preparing to harvest 50 acres of wheat and barley.
The cast of characters is a veritable gallery of greats: all the founding fathers, with George Washington as the foundingest father of them all; Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre and Napoleon; Catherine the Great, Prince Potemkin and Thaddeus Kosciuszko.
Veritable renaissance men, then?
He discusses casting and character development like a veritable corporate executive, earnestly defending the choice of Mickey Rourke as his nemesis in this high-stakes sequel.
Muhtar, another old acquaintance, is running for mayor; this election is one of the threads that are all but buried in the subsequent days beneath a veritable blizzard of further complications and characters.
True, we get into the minds of a few key characters — Holmes performs a veritable hatchet job on Cuvier — but what of the gazers who queued up by the thousands to catch a glimpse of the famous bottom?
