Unsold P.G. Wodehouse/The Inimitable Jeeves op-ed

Wednesday 11/29/23

As I've said, for all of the op-eds that are published, there are many more that don't run, which never has anything to do with the actual quality of the work itself but rather reasons that are well documented in these pages and which the reader can apply to something like the below not appearing. All of these works together will eventually go into a book of the opinion writings by the person who was the best to ever do it. Add it to the list.

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A century of laughing with P.G. Wodehouse’s first Jeeves novel.

Something which has always impressed me about laughter is how much we need it. If we don’t laugh, we don’t live, whether we’re happy or in pain. It’s as if laughter was this ace worker who sized up the life market and figured out how to be perpetually employable.

I really started thinking about laughter when I first experienced death. People would be at a hospital, smack in the middle of a pain that was about to get worse when a loved one officially left this world, and yet there’d still still be a wry comment and a concomitant smile. It was like there had to be, or something even larger than life would be lost.

I’ve always looked to laugh when I read. I wrote a book about the 1951 Alastair Sim film Scrooge based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and one of the tenets of the book was just how funny that movie was. Tartly witty and wise, on behalf of the soul in darkness. Laughter wants us to be okay and help us be okay.

Aims on that score were certainly fulfilled 100 years ago in the early autumn of 1923 when a novel came out in the States that can still teach us much about laughter. P.G. Wodehouse had been publishing fiction for two decades, but he had never come up with two characters like the duo of The Inimitable Jeeves.

We have the butler of the title, a majordomo who could efface any problem, be they real or imagined, and Bertie Wooster, man of leisure with the roundabout way of speaking and his knack for both creating and fantasticating situations that required undoing.

The Inimitable Jeeves was comprised of eleven stories which Wodehouse brought together as a sustained narrative. Wooster has an easy life, but like most people, regardless of reality, he’s of the opinion that he faces grave and unique challenges, with Jeeves being the guy who both vexes and rescues him.

Wooster is no dummy, and the more you come to know him, the more you understand he has a pretty good understanding of who he is. But even still, whenever a new adventure starts, he doubts the redoubtable Jeeves, no matter how many times the latter has steered him righter than rain in the past.

Rarely do I go a month without reading a Jeeves novel or story. They remind me that if you’re going to get through anything, you have to allow laughter to do its thing. You can’t cast it out or forgo it because it seems incongruous with what you might be feeling. The more weight upon you, the more you need to laugh.

Wooster’s problems are silly in the grand scheme of things, but they’re not to him as they’re happening. When he loses his wits, he keeps his wit, which helps to ultimately restore his cooler head, along with the skillful machinations of his butler.

Jeeves is tight-lipped, phlegmatic, efficient. But you can tell he loves a joke and one at Wooster’s expense. He’s the kind of person who is howling on the inside.

When you howl on the inside, you feel like you have a leg up on everything. The universe. Death. You can never be bored. You’re never sunk, but rather still swimming no mater what, which can itself be funny.

When I am gutted and low, and the sun has gone done, I head out out to the café to read of Jeeves and Bertie and laugh. I’m that guy at the table who is smirking to himself, and howling on the inside. I’m comforted because I feel alive, not done yet, and maybe not by a long stretch and for a long time.

Which is how Bertie usually feels after Jeeves has bailed him out and wasn’t this total ignoramus after all about the complexities of the world. You get the sense that Bertie needs to be able to laugh at himself and this is how he does it.

When we find a way to laugh in hard times we’re saying, “Do you believe this situation?” We’re stepping outside of our torment for a giggle and that is so empowering, strength-fostering.

If you can laugh, you can be okay. You can live to laugh another day. And maybe that will be a better one, all in all. Either way, you can always help yourself along with some Jeeves and Bertie. They knew how to howl inside and out, which is its own art form in life, as Wodehouse the artist of laughter understood so well.