Stephen Fry on PG Wodehouse

Kate got me the complete Jeeves and Wooster on DVD for Christmas, and we've been chomping through them at a steady clip. Both Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves are pitch-perfect. Meanwhile, Ed Page pointed me to this appreciation of PGW by Fry in the Independent.



Have you read any Wodehouse? Read some. My somewhat-considered opinion is that the English culture of understatement and oblique expression (taken to its extreme in the upper classes prior to WWII) is a great advantage for Wodehouse as a humorist. There are no gags--or everything is a gag; the humor in Wodehouse is like an invisible gas that builds over time until it breaks down the hardest reader. Furthermore, choosing to write about the insulated monied classes gives Wodehouse the ability to write in a nearly consequence-free world. Seirous consequences--as opposed to the problems that drive any plot--engage the reader's emotion, and you can't have that, unless you're reading satire. Wodehouse is, above all, sunny.



Anyway, that's just what I think at the moment, and reserve the right to call myself an idiot at some future date. Read some Wodehouse.