Upperclass Twit of the Year

The world of P.G. Wodehouse is yet another one that I tumbled backwards into. Growing up on a diet of PBS television, I spent a fair deal of my youth geeking out over the hilarity of a BBC program that adapted Wodehouse's most famous writings under the title of "Jeeves and Wooster. " Starring a pair that would grow much more famous for other things (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, the latter almost impossibly associated with the very-unlike-Bertie-Wooster Dr. House), the show was a mashing-together of Wodehouse's stories, centered around the paternal relationship Jeeves, a gentleman's personal gentleman, has with his daffy, brain-dead employer, Bertie Wooster. As a show, it was mostly fun to watch Hugh Laurie blubbering and dithering like an airheaded idiot as Stephen Fry glided through the frame with a certain stoic intelligence. Anyone who's seen Laurie's stretch on Blackadder knows this character.

Anyhow, the books are (as I've recently rediscovered) delightful and absolute fluff. That's not a prejorative -- it's fluff of the highest order, written in the voice of a narrator who's too simple to be unreliable, but who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. There are dozens of little flourishes (Bertie trying to come up with the word "psychology" and then confirming with Jeeves that "psychology" is, in fact, a noun) all rooted in Bertie's knowledge (made possible by his wealth and lineage) and demonstrating his total lack of understanding. The plots are silly beyond belief (mostly revolving around Bertie getting himself or his friends in and out of various romantic entanglements) but as a showcase for dazzlingly goofy writing, it's about as good as they come.