Funny as damnit

I discovered P.G. Wodehouse back in 1980, when I was living away from my parents for the first time. I had a job I didn't especially like, was living with a roommate I didn't especially like, had broken up with a boyfriend, and I didn't have a car. Things seemed a bit on the dark and gloomy side. Then I discovered Wodehouse through his novel Full Moon and found myself laughing out loud on practically every page. Within a couple of months, I had a better job, a car, and a new boyfriend with whom I eventually moved in. Clearly, Wodehouse changed my life!

I got on a bit of a Wodehouse jag, reading 3 or 4 novels and some short stories, and over the years I kept buying his books, and have accumulated over 20 Wodehouse volumes. But my guilty secret is that I that after that first rush, I quit reading him. He is a very witty writer, but his plots are all the same. In his most famous series, Jeeves is a valet to young rich gadabout Bertie Wooster and is constantly getting Bertie out of all kinds of scrapes, mostly involving wriggling out of unwanted engagements with young women. His other famous series involves escapades among the rich and the servants (and often, some prize pigs) at Blandings Castle. I would find myself laughing quite a bit, but then I'd get to page 40 and realize that the story was going in the same direction as all the others, involving characters I couldn't keep track of and didn't really like. Funny as damnit, as Bertie might say, but I'd get bogged down, close the book, and never pick it back up.

Last month, I bought a Wodehouse reprint (many if not most of his over 100 books, written between 1915 and 1974, have remained in print), Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, read it all the way through and enjoyed it. This time when I hit page 40, I realized that the plots and the characters don't really matter very much--what matters is, as a quote on the cover from Simon Brett says, the way Wodehouse plays with language. More to the point in the Jeeves books, it's the narrative tone of Bertie Wooster, a jackassedly unreliable narrator who gets everything wrong but who, thanks to the intervention of Jeeves, comes up smelling like a rose by the end.

Here is Wooster on his own image: "'Wooster,' those who know me have sometimes said, 'may be a pretty total loss during the daytime hours, but plunge the world into darkness, switch on the soft lights, uncork the champagne and shove a dinner into him, and you'd be surprised." Describing himself leaping in the air to get away from a snarling dog: "A cat on hot bricks could not have moved with greater nippiness." I now find myself wanting to say things like, "Well, I'll be dashed" and "Got to leg it home" and "She was what-the-helling all day" in casual conversation. My favorite Woosterism is using initials, sometimes confusingly. He refers to the Woosters' being able to "take the rough with the s." and it took me a minute to figure out the s. was the smooth. Pouring oil on troubled w. was a little more obvious.

Now that I've decided not to worry about plot or characterization, I may be at the beginning of another Wodehouse jag. I'm watching some of the Jeeves and Wooster shows from the 90s with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry (pictured above) and a colleague of mine at work who loves Wodehouse has decided to read some Wodehouse along with me, so we'll have our own little 2-person book club, laughing our a.'s off and ignoring the real world.