
The blissfully escapist comic novels of PG Wodehouse - unquote
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200602-the-man-who-wrote-the-most-perfect-sentences-ever-written
======
raffraffraff
Reset my password after a long time lurking just to say: the BBC radio plays
of Jeeves & Wooster, with Richard Briers playing the role of Bertie Wooster,
are the best way to experience these stories. Fabulous acting. Far, far better
than the Hugh & Laurie series from the 90s.

The heavily adapted BBC TV series Blandings is also hilarious.

~~~
eeh
Which story do you recommend first?

~~~
pseudolus
I will interject here and recommend "The Code of the Woosters". It's Wodehouse
at his apex.

~~~
kinleyd
Yes, that would be an excellent entry point!

------
JackFr
The Fry and Laurie shows aren’t bad, neither is the BBC Blandings, but PG
Wodehouse is best read. As a comic stylist he’s unsurpassed.

------
egypturnash
I have fond memories of reading his stories of rich imbeciles wittering about
and having their asses repeatedly saved by their silently obedient and scarily
smart butlers, but I am not sure I could read them now without the same
uncanny change in how I view the "tinny/woody" Python sketch: all these total
dumbfucks going on about the most inane thing possible -- while a whole set of
servants stand behind them, waiting to serve whatever inane whim they may
have.

It does help that it is immensely clear that you are _supposed_ to see Bertie
as an idiot, but...

~~~
esperent
The tinny/woody Python sketch was _always_ meant to be viewed that way. That's
why I love Python so much - they used absurdist humour as a vessel for
scathing social commentary which at the time pushed the boundaries of the
acceptable.

~~~
egypturnash
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that part of it just went right over my head when I was
twelve and it was on the local PBS station just before/after Doctor Who. :)

------
recursivedoubts
"Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release
future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He
has made a world for us to live in and delight in."

\--Evelyn Waugh

~~~
billfruit
Waugh is suitably comic himself in some of his novels himself, like 'Men at
Arms'.

------
techknight
IMO the audiobook versions narrated by Jonathan Cecil are the best of the lot:
you get a voice that sounds like both Fry and Laurie, and the richness of the
full text.

------
pale-hands
I've got about 50 of his 71 novels. For sure they're entertaining, well
constructed and the use of language is delightful.

There's something you notice if you read a whole lot of Wodehouse in quick
succession: I'd estimate that there are about 20 plots among the ones I've
read -- that is to say, the same situations, characters and plot devices are
reused often, and if you removed the redundancy, you'd end up with about 20
novels. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

~~~
Arnt
There's also only one chapter order, which the great man used in every single
book: 2 follows 1, 3 follows 2, etc. I can't remember even a flashback? I
don't think his interests extended to that. He wrote sentences, paragraphs,
not much more.

I have 15-20, my favourite is an unusual one, I think: French Leave.

------
ScottFree
There's a comic book adaptation of Right Ho, Jeeves:
[https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/right-ho-
jeeves/list?t...](https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/right-ho-
jeeves/list?title_no=414742&page=1)

------
jerrysievert
note that you can download some of his books for free:

[https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=wodehouse](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=wodehouse)

while the Jeeves and Wooster novels are fantastic, I found the bean stories to
be quite amusing as well.

------
asimovfan
Start with the Bertie Wooster series, read ALL of his books. Don't watch the
fry & laurie series, im sure they're funny, but they cannot be better than the
books

~~~
dghf
> Don't watch the fry & laurie series, im sure they're funny, but they cannot
> be better than the books

The early seasons are fine (but not as good as the books).

In later seasons, however, they decided to "improve" the stories by adding
over-the-top stuff that would never have appeared in the books. E.g., at the
end of one episode, Bertie and Jeeves literally jump overboard from a cruise
liner to escape Honoria Glossop et al.: they arrive back in England eight
months later, sun-burnt and bearded.

------
pseudolus
Apparently Wodehouse lived in the US from 1947 until his death in 1975 [0]. A
few years ago I ran across a blog that detailed a visit to his grave. I was
surprised to learn that he was buried in Long Island (Remsenburg, NY) [1].
Perhaps a trip worth making for those of his fans who live in the NYC/Long
Island Area.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse)

[1] [http://aerohaveno.blogspot.com/2018/05/he-gave-joy-
visiting-...](http://aerohaveno.blogspot.com/2018/05/he-gave-joy-visiting-pg-
wodehouses.html)

------
klenwell
There was also an interesting New Yorker article on Wodehouse recently about
his experience as a Nazi captive:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/wartime-for-
wo...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/wartime-for-wodehouse)

I never picked Wodehouse for a prisoner of war. But I guess he handled it with
characteristic aplomb.

That article inspired me to search for the Fry and Laurie series. It's not
being streamed on any of the popular platforms but I did find some decent
quality uploads on Youtube. My wife and I have enjoyed it immensely. I think I
discovered why it hasn't been picked up by any of the online platforms when we
got to the blackface episode in season 2.

A different era, in two respects I suppose, and all that. Unfortunate
nevertheless. Anyone know where I could find the BBC radio episodes online?

~~~
neonate
As the New Yorker article explains, he also did propaganda broadcasts for the
Nazis while there, and while this caused a scandal in Britain that persisted
after the war, it surprisingly (by today's unforgiving standards) never ruined
his reputation. It seems that most people who have looked into it concluded
that he was genuinely trying to cheer people up and was genuinely naive about
the consequences. Orwell, whose judgment seems to have been as sound as
anyone's, only he somehow managed to do it in real time, defended Wodehouse:
[https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
foundation/orwel...](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/in-defence-of-p-g-wodehouse/).

~~~
dang
That Orwell article is brilliant from start to finish ("there are other
culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing"). We think of Orwell as
a political and moral writer more than an arty one (and he famously wrote
about how he sacrificed his art to politics), but this is among other things a
fantastic piece of literary criticism. Examples:

 _How closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the
fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke.
This is an enormous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make._

 _Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of
Baudelaire or James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, so
an English reader can see that in creating such characters as Hildebrand
Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever,
Wodehouse is not really attacking the social hierarchy._

 _It is nonsense to talk of ‘Fascist tendencies’ in his books. There are no
post-1918 tendencies at all._

Orwell obviously knows Wodehouse inside-out, right back to obscure early
books, which must mean that he was a fan. Why read them otherwise?

~~~
klenwell
I guess you could call Orwell's essay an exoneration but it is, to my reading,
no defense. It strikes me as sharply political and moral. And, I agree,
scintillating literary criticism.

Your excerpts go to the heart of the argument. If Orwell thinks it's nonsense
to call Wodehouse a fascist, it's not because Wodehouse was necessarily above
fascism. It's because he was too silly and stupid ("the events of 1941 do not
convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity") to even perceive it, a
literal schoolboy:

 _As I have tried to show, his moral outlook has remained that of a public-
school boy, and according to the public-school code, treachery in time of war
is the most unforgivable of all the sins._

I don't know that this was fair to Wodehouse. The New Yorker article seems to
take a more charitable view:

 _His resilient happiness, to me, remains heroic, and more essentially who he
was._

My dad and I were struggling to explain the phrase "damn with faint praise" to
a young relative a while back. This essay wouldn't have helped our cause
because, well, it's loaded. But it is a master class in the concept.

~~~
dang
It's more like praising with faint damn, I think. Orwell was a man of the
pretty-far left. The public-school class system must have been anathema to him
(at the same time as he was a product of Eton—where, by the way, fellow future
anti-utopian novelist Aldous Huxley was his French teacher) and yet he
presents Wodehouse not as any kind of villain but just hapless and obsolete.
So obsolete that you'd never guess that Wodehouse would outlive Orwell himself
by 25 years.

This article might have been as much of a defence as it was politically
possible for Orwell to produce in 1945. Even his famous independence from
sectarianism must have had its limits. I also think one can put one's finger
on why Orwell was so sympathetic to Wodehouse and so willing to judge him
softly: they were both profoundly and essentially English. People have often
pointed this out about Orwell, saying for example that his deep Englishness
was the wellspring of his immunity to ideology. I think that same quality is
probably what resonated with Orwell about Wodehouse - he was sympathetic in
the literal sense of the word, having similar feelings. There are moments in
this article where it's as if he's reading Wodehouse from within.

~~~
082349872349872
Was the Brave New World that anti-utopian? For all we know, the island may
have been super chill.

~~~
dang
There's a great old web comic about the differences between Orwell's and
Huxley's anti-utopias and how Huxley predicted the future much better. I bet
your question is related to that development.

~~~
082349872349872
Yes. I'd be grateful if you ever remember an URL.

Specifically, Mond tells us (ch 16):

"One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the Controller, as
the door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand that
his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to
say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of
men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one
reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into
community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got
independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost
envy you, Mr. Watson."

~~~
dang
Looks like [https://highexistence.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-
huxley-...](https://highexistence.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-huxley-vs-
orwell/)

via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433283)

~~~
082349872349872
Thanks! It's reassuring to consider that "Amusing Ourselves to Death" was
written in the 1980s.

The comic doesn't address the ways to leave the system, however. Brave New
World, as mentioned above, has its islands, and (not having read anything of
1984 beyond the Goldstein chapters: is there anything I don't already have
from pop culture in the rest of the book, or are those chapters just the
"fast-forward"?) it seems that Oceanic refuseniks who didn't wish to toe the
party line could be ignored by joining the proletariat (which might imply
material and intellectual poverty, but freedom's just another word...)

------
muststopmyths
I don't think anyone has ever made me physically roll around laughing since
Wodehouse back in my youth. I wish the libraries were open again.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
Wodehouse is available online: his works have started entering the public
domain

------
mythrwy
I just listened to "The Inimitable Jeeves" and "Leave It To PSmith" on the
Classic Tales podcast.

Both were very amusing.

------
ripberge
Discovered him a few years ago, incredibly funny. If you want to escape the
worries of modern times, highly recommend.

~~~
rsynnott
Also some stuff which addresses the worries of the modern world, of course.

> “The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in
> inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about
> in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil,
> Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you
> make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that
> frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff
> see such a perfect perisher?”

(Roderick Spode is a parody or Oswald Mosley, the head of the then current
British Union of Fascists)

------
yawaramin
My grandfather's book collection included _Uneasy Money,_ a Gilded Age rom-com
that sparked my love for Wodehouse.

------
robotmay
I love the 90s TV series with Fry and Laurie (as in the article image), but
I've sadly never managed to get into the books as I have an extreme dislike of
books written in the first person. There are a lot of good books I've missed
out on because of this. My desire to try and get into the Wodehouse books is
pretty high, though, so perhaps another attempt is warranted.

~~~
dhosek
Ah, but first person offers so many wonderful opportunities for wit and voice
that are impossible in third, and Wodehouse takes great advantage of that,
with Bertie Wooster as the narrator of most of the stories (I can't remember
if it's a single story or a whole book that are narrated by Jeeves) and
providing a wonderful example of unreliable narration. I wish I'd remembered
that when I was looking for good unreliable narrators for a craft piece I
wrote during my MFA.

~~~
robotmay
Don't get me wrong; I totally get the reasons for doing it, but unfortunately
I have some weird problem with reading books written that way :(

When I read fiction I barely notice the words on the page and instead (sort
of?) see what's happening in my head. It's not like characters even have a
properly defined look, but I am visualising everything. However when the book
is written in first-person, it plays havoc with my imagination and I really
struggle to see the characters; it's just words on a page. It reads more like
non-fiction, which for some reason doesn't trigger the same effect.

------
pmoriarty
It seems I'm the only one who found Wodehouse's brand of humor insipid and not
in the least bit funny.

~~~
plonex
I just started reading excerpts on the web and did not find it captivating
either. The ones I read would need to be pronounced with an exaggerated
British accent to be remotely funny.

My first impression was: Oscar Wilde (who is captivating after a single page)
for the masses.

