I’ve mentioned before my addiction to the Hugh Laurie characterization of P.G. Wodehouse’s quintessential dingaling, Bertie Wooster. Bertie is everything hopelessly one-sided about the British upper classes: white, male, rich, privileged, and a complete brainless gorm. He’s melodramatic, narcissistic, and self-glamorizing to the point of insanity. He’s also, fortunately, good-hearted, talkative, impulsive, surrounded by people even more harebrained than himself, and driven relentlessly by something he calls the Code of the Woosters—which simply means Wodehouse put him into predicaments and refused to let him take the sensible way out.

And Hugh Laurie has given Bertie the flamboyant mannerisms and puzzled jolliness he needed to round him out perfectly. In Laurie’s hands Bertie suffers a constant, unending series of facial expressions, ranging from baffled to appalled to triumphant and everything in between—even when he’s not talking, his wonderfully-mobile face simply never rests.

My husband has gotten so fond of Laurie’s Bertie that it’s causing hitherto unknown resources of genius to surface in him. He announced recently he’s discovered how to read Moby Dick without getting bogged down in Melville’s nineteenth-century loquacity.

“Picture Bertie dragging on a gasper,” my husband says, “while holding captive one Jeeves standing in the doorway with a trayful of empty glasses enduring the moments until he can retire to the kitchen. Sometimes I mentally put in an ‘I see, sir,’ or ‘Quite so, sir.’”

And damned if it doesn’t work! Suddenly Melville takes on a whole new personality. Talk about your layering!

So today we’re linking to Moby Dick, to be read as told by Bertie Wooster.