Student Grant is a cartoon strip in the
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
comic
Viz featuring a
UniversityA university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
studentThe word student is etymologically derived through Middle English from the Latin second-type conjugation verb studēre, meaning "to direct one's zeal at"; hence a student could be described as "one who directs zeal at a subject"...
named
Grant Wankshaft. It first appeared in 1992 and was quite prolific during the rest of the 1990s, although has appeared less frequently since then. The strip was created by Simon Thorp.
Grant Wankshaft is a student at the fictional
Spunkbridge University (a pun on
CambridgeThe city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. It is also at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen....
;
spunk and
cum are British
slangSlang is the use of highly informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language. It is often used as a way to say words that are not appropriate, and is not often found in the standard dictionary for the language...
for
semenSemen is an organic fluid, also known as seminal fluid, that usually contains spermatozoa. It is secreted by the gonads and other sexual organs of male or hermaphroditic animals and can fertilize female ova...
).
Student Grant is a cartoon strip in the
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
comic
Viz featuring a
UniversityA university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
studentThe word student is etymologically derived through Middle English from the Latin second-type conjugation verb studēre, meaning "to direct one's zeal at"; hence a student could be described as "one who directs zeal at a subject"...
named
Grant Wankshaft. It first appeared in 1992 and was quite prolific during the rest of the 1990s, although has appeared less frequently since then. The strip was created by Simon Thorp.
Grant Wankshaft is a student at the fictional
Spunkbridge University (a pun on
CambridgeThe city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. It is also at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen....
;
spunk and
cum are British
slangSlang is the use of highly informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language. It is often used as a way to say words that are not appropriate, and is not often found in the standard dictionary for the language...
for
semenSemen is an organic fluid, also known as seminal fluid, that usually contains spermatozoa. It is secreted by the gonads and other sexual organs of male or hermaphroditic animals and can fertilize female ova...
). One strip had him down as an undergraduate in Peace Studies although this was never referenced again. His school grades were mediocre at best - he certainly achieved a C in
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
at GCSE but he misinterpreted a
porterA porter is a railroad employee assigned to assist passengers aboard a passenger train or to handle their baggage; it may be used particularly to refer to employees assigned to assisting passengers in the sleeping cars....
telling him to take a train from platform "treize" for platform "trois" and ended up in Siberia.
It made obvious (especially in the early strips) that Grant does very little or no work to his degree. One strip had him visiting his department (he originally did not know where it was, and had to be directed by a friend) to see his personal tutor, who pointed out that he had not handed in a single essay in three years, and would have to expel Grant if he didn't do them all (Grant responded by pointing out that he believed he had soiled himself). Also the terms seem ridiculously short (4 weeks in one case, with the Christmas vacation lasting until late March).
Grant likes to think of himself as a very
liberalLiberalism is the belief in the importance of individual freedom. This belief is widely accepted today throughout the world, and was recognized as an important value by many philosophers throughout history...
intellectual who is both independent and is very worldly-wise. In reality he frequently shows bigoted opinions, is not especially bright, relies on his doting parents for money and has little idea about the world outside of campus. In some ways he is similar to the character Rick in the sitcom
The Young OnesThe Young Ones was a popular British sitcom, first broadcast in 1982, on BBC2. Its anarchic, offbeat humour helped bring alternative comedy to television in the 1980s and made household names of its writers and performers...
.
Grant has a number of friends who are just like him in that they are eager to express their "individuality" by all wearing the same kind of clothes. The latest student fashions they wear are invariably ridiculous, like huge hats, bright yellow dungarees and T-shirts with geeky slogans on them like
All your base are belong to us"All your base are belong to us" is a broken English phrase that was central to an Internet phenomenon, or meme, in 2000-2002, with the spread of a Flash animation that depicted the slogan...
,
Thunderbirds Are Go!Thunderbirds is a British mid-1960s television show devised by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and made by AP Films using a form of marionette puppetry dubbed "Supermarionation". The series followed the adventures of International Rescue, an organisation created to help those in grave danger using...
and, in the late 1990s especially,
Teletubbies Say 'Eh Oh'!Teletubbies is a BBC BAFTA winning children's television series, primarily aimed at pre-school viewers, produced from 1997 to 2001 by Ragdoll Productions. It was created by Anne Wood CBE, Ragdoll's creative director, and Andrew Davenport, who wrote each of the show's 365 episodes. The show's...
. They are very opinionated and love to talk loudly (and ignorantly) about various subjects, emphasising their sureness about their statements by tagging "...actually!" at the end of their sentences. They are convinced of how intelligent they are, usually "proving" it by listing the grades they got in their A-levels. Several of Grant's collegiate friends have bizarre speech impediments or dental deformities, or both. Grant spends (his parents') money freely but begrudges being obliged to pay full price for anything because, as he constantly notes "students are really feeling the pinch".
Grant and his friends are all obsessed with being
politically correctPolitically Correct may refer to:*Political correctness, language, ideas, policies, or behaviour seeking to minimize offence to groups of people-See also:*Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, book by James Finn Garner, published in 1994...
, to the point where they often argue about who is the most politically correct of them all, such as the time they had a passionate debate about whether it was racist or not to like
Ali GAli G was a satirical fictional character invented and performed by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen...
(
"Well I heard black people do like Ali G, so if you don't like him, that makes you racist, actually!").
Although Grant likes to think of himself as in touch with the working classes, he is actually from a solid
middle classThe middle class are any class in the middle of a social schema. In Weberian socio-economic terms they are the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socioeconomically between the working class and upper class. In Marxist terms, middle class commonly refers to either the...
background. He also clearly has a lot of latent contempt for the working classes and non-students in general, regarding them as ill-educated peasants. Because he has a habit of making his opinions loud and clear, this has resulted in a number of savage beatings for Grant on the occasions he strayed off campus and into the real world.
In the early 1990s, when students received a maintenance grant in addition to free tuition, Student Grant appeared in most issues. Most students receive neither free tuition nor maintenance grants now, so the joke in the character's name is out of date.