Corporals in Popular Culture
Napoleon Bonaparte and Benito Mussolini were corporals at one time. The first was nicknamed "The Little Corporal". Although Adolf Hitler has often been referred to as a "corporal" in English, his actual rank, Gefreiter, was more equivalent to senior private; he was never a corporal (Unteroffizier).
A Corporalship or Corporal's guard is a name for a small band of followers based on the small amount of soldiers directly led by a corporal.
In the movie Aliens, after the death of Sergeant Apone and a concussion suffered by Lieutenant Gorman, Corporal Hicks takes command, where he is referred to as a "grunt".
In the novelization of the game Doom, the main protagonist Flynn Taggart is a corporal in the United States Marine Corps at the beginning of the story, though he later receives a promotion to Sergeant.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, there is a small, unpleasant Corporal named Nobby Nobbs. A running joke in the books is that he is so small and unpleasant that it is disputed whether or not he is human.
In M*A*S*H, Radar O'Reilly and Maxwell Klinger were in the rank of corporal.
The protagonist of Valves Half-Life: Opposing Force is a US Marine Corporal named Adrian Shephard.
Corporal Blutch from the Belgian comic books Les Tuniques Bleues, is a bluecoat cavalryman in the Northern army during the American Civil War.
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“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
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