Professor Blowhard may have been one of those great cosmic, mystical foreshadowings, because when I ran into the character of Donkey in the 2001 movie Shrek, my inner Blowhard felt an immediate bond. Donkey is after all a very WYSIWYG kind of a guy (What You See Is What You Get). He’s very spontaneous and honest but knows at times how to be thoroughly annoying. He is also capable of making a complete ass of himself while hardly noticing it. To this day he’s my greatest identity and inspiration.
In fact, Professor Blowhard’s multiple comes so naturally for him it serves as something of a default mode for Lord DonnieBob when he’s not manifesting other personae. Loquacious and erudite with just a touch of pretentiousness, he will sit there in his corduroy jacket with the leather elbow patches, droning on for hours and hours about one subject after another, often knowing very little of what he’s talking about or caring in any event. But he loves to hear the sound of his own voice, the result of years of being ignored and blackballed from polite religious company. He is known at times to stop and admire the profundity of what he just said, Ronald Reagan/George W. Bush-style.
The professor also doubles as a preacher at times who has pioneered his own unique technique. Whereas most preachers deliver a three point sermon to make things simple and easy to remember, Professor Blowhard has developed his patented 33 Point Sermon that leaves the listener so disoriented and his head so spinning that it serves as something of a cheap substitute for a transcendental religious experience. People will sometimes even pass out and fall into the aisle, thinking they are seeing heavenly visions.
Actually they’re just confused. The whole phenomenon has given him something of a reputation as a revivalist however, and paved the way for the watershed event that really began to tie things together.