Linking to P. G. Wodehouse

Today I’m bringing you one of my all-time favorite writers of comedy: the inimitable P.G. Wodehouse. It’s Friday, and I say, what the hell.

I’m taking the weekend off from the publishing world, this madcap adventure in publicity, loquacity, and marketing perspicacity run amock. There is only so much eagle-eyed analysis one person can do before they keel over backward on their heels and find, behind them, their husband sitting calmly with a laptop waiting to share an evening of Jeeves and Wooster.

For those of you unfamiliar with this fabulous British TV series, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry spent the early 1990s bringing to the third dimension P.G. Wodehouse’s classic valet (in England that must be pronounced “valett”) and the congenitally lunatic young dandy he serves.

Hugh Laurie wrote this wonderful piece on playing Bertie Wooster, surely one of the greatest comic performances of all time. Until you’ve seen Laurie go through his facial shenanigans upon first swallowing Jeeves’ magic hangover cure in Episode One you haven’t really lived.

Stephen Fry wrote this touching piece on Wodehouse’s extraordinary facility with language, particularly the comic metaphor, denying that his creation, the hapless Bertie, is as “mentally negligible” as Wodehouse made Jeeves claim.

But far and away the most amazing thing about it all is the books themselves, those marvelous plunges into the absurd where “Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastadons bellowing across the primeval swamp” and Wodehouse’s hilarious creations of the British upper classes stumble through life showing every evidence that in-breeding does, in fact, do exactly to the human IQ what doctors are always telling us it does. Although anyone not raised on the mythology that the British upper classes are a simple fact of life, like toenails, may find themself commenting repeatedly, “But these people don’t do anything for all that money,” there’s no avoiding the fact that Wodehouse had the ability to pack mixed metaphors into a single sentence in a mind-boggling display of comedic mania that would have simply destroyed any lesser writer.

And I’m not just saying this because I first read Wodehouse at the tender age of twelve on a creaky old tub of an Italian freighter crossing the Atlantic in 1973, in the abandoned 1930s library of what had once been a very small, very charming, very wood-paneled British passenger ship.