Can Thomas Mann create a comical character?

Thomas Mann is by no means known as a “comic” writer; sure, there are a few laugh lines in The Magic Mountain (1927), but it’s 700+ pages, so a laugh here and there is inevitable, law of averages! But wait: Suddenly, about 600 pp in, this great novelist, the preeminent novelist of ideas, introduces a character who’s hysterical: Mynheer (Dutch for Mr.) Peeperkorn. This character bursts on the scene as a new guest at the Berghof sanatorium (for TB patients, primarily) and he dominates the scene from his moment of arrival: big, blustering, boystrous, out-sizing everyone in his presence through his booming voice, his extravagant expenditures, his excessive eating and drinking, his gambling, a Falstaffian giant, but a deeply flawed magnificence. As it happens, mostly because he’s half (or wholly) drunk all the time, he can never complete a thought or sometimes a sentence. He starts off each utterance w/ a grandiose pronouncement, and in short order his words fall apart and he ends up spouting nonsense or saying nothing (nothing intelligible, at least). He’s a really a Dickensian character, and who knew that Mann could or would create a character in this mode? Yet he’s by no means here for “comic relief,” that rather ridiculous concept (Who really needs to be “relieved” while reading a book or watching a show? Relieved from what?). He comes onto the stage of MM as the new sexual/romantic partner of the strange and beautiful Clavdia Chauchat – the married Russian woman on whom the protagonist, Hans, has developed a huge crush. After declaring to her his love on the eve of her temporary departure (her life is a matter of roaming from one spa or resort to the next), he eagerly awaits her return in hopes of winning her love in some manner; he’s crushed when she returns w/ this new, ridiculous, but hugely wealthy man – but we, of course, see that Hans to her is a plaything, that she could never be serious about him in any way – she’s far more experienced, and far more cruel, than anything he could imagine.