ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)
By:
August 3, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.
EDDIE HASKELL
Eddie Haskell is a total dick, so why do I, and everybody, like him best? We’d all probably hate him if we met in real life, but the TV or computer screen gives us a distance to enjoy watching what we’d abhor experiencing, in compelling car-wreck personalities from Eddie Haskell to Roman Roy and whoever’s next.
Cynical, always posing as something he’s not, and “in and out of every kind of trouble there is in school,” Haskell is the bad apple on sitcom Leave it to Beaver (1957–63), the best friend and worst influence on older brother Wally in the Cleaver family the show is centered on.
Eddie is always being super-formal to the parents he then insults behind their back (or the peers he abuses to their face, as with Wally’s younger brother, nicknamed “Beaver,” who he’s dissing seconds after asking if “Wallace and Theodore are at home”). But while the show is misremembered as an uncritical idyll of complacent white midcentury suburbia, it had a post-McCarthy-era eye out not for how to conform to a societal norm, but be true to yourself; at one point Cleaver dad Ward remarks of Eddie, “That boy is so polite it’s almost un-American.” The typical troublemaker in mainstream pop culture of the time was a self-destructing “delinquent,” gang-member, biker; Eddie may crawl right to the top as a yes-man and -ma’am-ing Nixon White House aide.
Whispering ideas for scams and prank vandalism to Wally and others who get blamed for it while Eddie doesn’t, he’s like a teen Iago, except that Iago is jockeying for glory while Eddie just hopes to get over and get by. That may be why we sympathize with him, his dissatisfaction with the status quo on display in ways we root for and his insecurities obvious in ways we hope ours aren’t.
Eddie’s constant digs at adult authorities, like his famously catty compliments-not-compliments to Cleaver mom June (“Gee, your kitchen always looks so clean! My mother says it looks as though you never do any work in here”; “I think a small house like this makes a party so intimate”) display a terror at social status. His amazement that Wally and Beav’s parents have let them camp out in the yard and didn’t “drag them into the house” suggests a stern homelife. His moments of truth (Beaver: “Nobody likes you, Eddie — not even Wally, and he’s your best friend”) make us realize he’s not individual, just alone. Bad boys are often really sad ones.
Still, though, it’s all a show to us. The name rhymes with “rascal,” and audacity is always fun to watch. Eddie Haskell can’t win, and we don’t want him to… but he’s won us over from the start.
ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Heather Quinlan | Kathy Biehl on DR. FRANK-N-FURTER | Catherine Christman on ALEXIS CARRINGTON | Crockett Doob on M3GAN | Nick Rumaczyk on AURIC GOLDFINGER | Mariane Cara on MIRANDA PRIESTLY | Trav SD on PROFESSOR HINKLE | Alex Brook Lynn on TOM POWERS | Lynn Peril on ENDORA | Adam McGovern on EDDIE HASKELL | Mimi Lipson on SUE ANN NIVENS | Heather Quinlan on HAROLD SHAND | Tom Nealon on SKELETOR | Matthew Hodge on BARRY LYNDON | Josh Glenn on JOEL CAIRO | Dan Reines on WALTER PECK | Mark Kingwell on HARRY LIME | James Scott Maloy on CLARENCE BODDICKER | Nikhil Singh on LOCUTUS | Carolyn Campbell on CARSON DYLE | Tony Pacitti on DENNIS NEDRY | Gordon Dahlquist on WALKER | Colin Campbell on RUTH LYTTON | Marc Weidenbaum on THE XENOMORPHS | Susannah Breslin on ANTON CHIGURH | Micah Nathan on PATRICK BATEMAN.
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