How big is the Grinch?

Mac has something to say.

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As usual, Jon and Mac had this conversation over text.

MAC: Hi Jon.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: So. I will ask you, Jon, a question that I want everyone reading to answer for themselves:

How big would you say the Grinch is?

Like how tall is he? Don’t overthink it. First impression.

JON: I would sayyyyy the size of a man.
Not a tall man or anything.

MAC: So, a man-sized Grinch.

JON: Yes.

MAC: I would’ve also said man-sized.
Like 5’8”.
Is what I would say.

JON: Yeah. 38 jacket. Size 9 shoes.

MAC: Roughly.

JON: It’s worth noting, he does live like a yeti.
Yetis are usually a lot bigger than men.

MAC: Right, there is an argument for a huge Grinch.

JON: Yeah.

MAC: Also he was played in a movie by Jim Carrey, who strikes me as tall.
I don’t know if he is tall, but he gives me that impression.

JON: Yeah but I don’t like to think about how the Grinch looked in that movie.

MAC: Google says Jim Carrey is 6’2”.

JON: Does it say what size jacket.
Google says Jim Carrey is probably a 42.

MAC: I was just reading that too.
Wow, Google has some pretty specific measurements for Jim Carrey.
Regardless.
I, again, like you, would’ve said man-sized.
That is, I would’ve said that, before I started thinking about it a bunch yesterday.

So. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, of course, is about the Grinch ruining Christmas for all the Whos in Whoville.

Or trying to ruin it.

Spoiler alert, he doesn’t.

JON: He learns.
Not to.

MAC: He learns, but I will say — and this is tangential to the main question, the question about how big is the Grinch — that Dr. Seuss does a really good job making sure the Grinch’s lesson-learning doesn’t seem simplistic or mawkish.

JON: Can I say something.

MAC: Is it about Grinch size or lesson-learning?

JON: Just about all of this.

MAC: OK.

JON: I don’t know if Dr. Seuss was the mastermind here that you are suggesting he is, vis-à-vis how big is the Grinch.

MAC: Hold on hold on hold on.

JON: Like, I don’t know if he was thinking about it.

MAC: HOLD ON.

Let me talk about the lesson learning real quick.

Here is the Grinch’s epiphany:

The “maybes” are so nice there. They really cut the sweetness.
The “perhaps” and “little bit” too.

JON: Right.

MAC: Also it should be noted that the next thing he does is bring back the presents. So Christmas is definitely partly about the presents.

The Whos, down in the corner, seem pretty stoked that the presents are returning.
And their food.

JON: Right. They were singing and stuff, but they were also looking around like, “I hope there are still presents.”
“And food.”

MAC: Well speaking of Whos, one question we can answer right now is:
How big is the Grinch compared to a Who?

And the answer is… pretty big!

JON: He’s like a man to a child, right?

MAC: Bigger, I’d say:

JON: Oh well that’s Cindy Lou, though. She’s like, notably small, in town.

MAC: Yeah, she’s famously “two.”
But here he is next to an adult Who.

JON: Right.
Right.

MAC: He’s giant. This goes to your yeti theory.

JON: Yeah! This is about yeti difference, right? Or Bigfoot, at least.

MAC: Yes.
But.
How big is a Who?

JON: Right.
Smaller than a man.

MAC: Jon.
Way smaller than a man.
To find out how big a Who is, we have to look at a book that came out in 1954, three years before How the Grinch Stole Christmas: Horton Hears a Who.

The Whos in Horton Hears a Who live on a speck of dust.

JON: !

MAC: They are invisible to the naked eye.

JON: Oh.
The same Whos?
Wait, they all live on that thing he’s looking at there?

MAC: Yes!
The book actually does something really funny.

This is how Horton initially imagines the Who he hears on the speck of dust.

But then a few pages later Horton thinks the guy might have a family, and he has to adjust his mental picture.

But a few pages later, the Who is like, “By the way, I’m the mayor of a city.”

JON: Oh man.

MAC: This is all on the speck!

So.

JON: Right.

MAC: The Grinch.

JON: Right.

MAC: He’s microscopic!

JON: I love how, this week, you have an “out of office” email auto-response because you’re too busy, and you’re just on your lawn, one-battle-after-anothering about this.

MAC: JON THE GRINCH IS LIKE GERM-SIZED.

JON:

MAC: My robe has stripes and it was made in Italy.
But I do wear it to the grocery store sometimes.

JON: I’d like to… rebut.

MAC: Oh, here we go.
Sure, go ahead and try.

JON: There are a few things.

MAC: Great.

JON: There are, in the drawings, trees.
Now.
I’ll be the first to admit that if you go north, the trees do get smaller.
They kind of look like miniature trees.
So maybe those are the trees we are seeing.
And the mountains and hills.
Maybe those too, to a man with a 38 chest size and size 9 shoes (sounds pretty handsome to me), would be small.

MAC: Invisible.
Microscopic.

JON: Right.
But also there’s Max.
The dog.

MAC: Well this is what freaks me out the most.
I’ve had to readjust my mental picture of the Grinch.
Like, reimagine what it would look like to chill with the Grinch.
And I’ve gotten there.
But realizing Max was maybe the size of a tardigrade?
That I could never pet Max?
That really rocked my world.
I had trouble with it, emotionally.

JON: Yeah. He’s already got kind of a bad deal.
At least up until the end of the book.

MAC: But, Jon, that’s not a rebuttal.
I’d just encourage you to sit with your discomfort.
I acknowledge that I’ve had a 24-hour head start getting used to this new reality.

JON: Yeah, you’re pretty far out into it.
I just cleared my search of “what jacket size is Jim Carrey” to ask “how many Dr. Seuss books are there Whos in?” which I think used up some extra water over at the data center to make sense of.

MAC: Worth it.

JON: For sure.
But it did say that it’s only those two books!
That’s all we have.

MAC: I have two rebuttals — one you haven’t thought of and one you’ve already mentioned but forgot about.
I’d like to air them, and then destroy them.

JON: Rebuttals to yourself or to me?

MAC: Rebuttals to myself.

JON:

Go off.

MAC: OK, earlier you asked, about the Horton Whos, “Are these the same Whos?”

And while no, they are not necessarily the same Whos, the morphological variation among Whos that would allow for a man-sized Grinch is biologically impossible, even in the topsy-turvy world of Dr. Seuss.

JON: I’d like to insert a hypothetical-but-believable image of him here saying, “You don’t know how crazy I can get, man.”

MAC: Another rebuttal (and this one I take more seriously than the ridiculous thing that you just said): Mt. Crumpit, where the Grinch takes all the toys and food, is three-thousand feet tall.

So at first it seems like the Whos and the Grinch are on the Imperial system.
But my rebuttal to this rebuttal is:
That’s Who-feet.

JON: Well also (I don’t know how you got me arguing your side here) this image could be like, on a plateau area. We aren’t seeing the full mountain.

MAC: Yeah, but if it was 3,000 human feet tall, think about how long it would take a germ-sized Grinch to climb it.

JON: Or poor Max to pull the sled!

MAC: Right. It’s completely implausible, Jon.
Try to take this seriously.

JON: I had a thought about Max.

MAC: I can’t stop thinking about Max.

JON: So in the Horton illustrations there’s like a Who-town, right?
In this book too.
There’s little things. Flags and typewriters. There are small Who things.

He didn’t draw one, but I would’ve been fine with a Who-sized dog in there.
Maybe he would’ve made a small addition to signal that he’s a Who-dog.
Some little antennae of his own.

If Max had had antennae (which would complicate his eventual reindeer horn visually, so that would’ve been stressful), would you be OK with that?

MAC: Well, technically he’s a Grinch-dog, Jon.
He doesn’t live with the Whos.
Max is of the Grinches.

JON: He might’ve been with the Whos, at one point. I always kind of thought the Grinch stole him.

MAC:

JON: Max is too nice!!
A Grinch-dog would be like a spiritual sidekick.
They would both be looking down the mountain, sneering.
Max knows, deep down, somehow, for reasons he has forgotten, that the Whos are correct.
He’s a Who.

MAC: My favorite part of the animated special is when the Grinch is describing how awful the Whos’ singing is, and it cuts back to Max and he’s just wistfully smiling. He loves Who-song.

JON: See??
Chuck Jones knew too.
Me and Chuck.

MAC: Well, since I’ve proved my point, I just want to say one more thing — something that tells us how little we really know about the Grinch.

JON: Hahahaha.
“Well I think my work here is done. This is all pretty airtight.”

MAC: Jon. Are you ready?
The Grinch is not even green!
Not in the book!

JON: He’s just see-through.
Or white!
Yeti white!!

MAC: The Grinch is not transparent, Jon.

JON: I corrected myself.

MAC: And although the book is printed in two colors, black and red, there is green on the cover, and Seuss didn’t use it to color in the Grinch.
You know who made the Grinch green?
Chuck Jones.

Almost ten years later, for the animated special.
He says he based it on the color of his rental car when he went to La Jolla to hang out with Dr. Seuss.

JON: Incredible.

Theodore Geisel (AKA Dr. Seuss) and Chuck Jones

Well. I think it’s safe to say nobody else was thinking about this today.
But that’s what we do here.

I think, if we’re stretching, there is something in this that points to what we do to stories, and how we think about them, and why details matter — or are important.

MAC: I don’t really understand why you’re trying to make this more profound than it already is.

What lesson did we maybe, maybe learn today, Jon?

JON: You’re right, we should just let this be its own thing.

MAC: Tiny Grinch.

JON: I’m tired.