True, he has the odd moment of eccentricity, but such occasions (as his dancing and singing for joy when finding Selden's body rather than Sir Henry's in Hound, or his waxing philosophic over a rose in "The Naval Treaty") have a patently false ring to them. Doyle himself admitted that Holmes's character "admits no light or shade. He is a calculating machine- But what could Doyle expect from a fellow whose first spoken line ever is: "I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else!" .
To make Holmes palatable to mass audiences, screenwriters, playwrights, and actors realize that the cold, logical facade must crumble to reveal a humorous and witty underside. In "A Scandal in Bohemia," for example, Doyle may dramatically describe the "slow and heavy step" in the passageway and the "loud and authoritative tap" on the door that signals the King of Bohemia's arrival at Baker Street; yet how much more rewarding and comically human it is to see Jeremy Brett's panic-stricken Holmes quickly tidying up by throwing dirty dishes and huge piles of paper behind the furniture and then trying to gain a semblance of unruffled dignity as the king enters. Scenes like this (and they are countless in the Granada series and elsewhere) are not humorous just to be funny--they have a definite purpose. If we go back to Aristotle in the Poetics, we find that tragedy imitates persons above the level of our world while comedy imitates persons below it. Of necessity, then, writers use the latter form to "demythologize" the omniscient, machinelike Holmes. As that same godlike sleuth could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara from a drop of water, so too do writers and actors take what little detail Doyle furnished and expand upon it, thus removing Holmes from the remote, barren world he reigns over with pure reason, and endowing him with human depth, accessibility, and the capacity to surprise with conviction.