I’ve been wondering about humor and whether a robust sense of humor can help us to survive anything. As teenagers, I think most of us go through a phase when we wonder about the seriousness of the world around us, whether everything is just a joke or whether nothing is. Later in life, it becomes obvious that everything is. But even so, it is sometimes hard to maintain a detached and light-hearted attitude when the world seems so very determined to make us gloomy and depressed.
What brought these thoughts to mind was the anniversary of the author P.G. Wodehouse, who died fifty years ago on Long Island, where he had lived for many years and who was one of the best English comic writers of the last century. Some say that he was the finest since Shakespeare. He had splendid timing, and a Dickensian gift for making comedy out of life’s dark side. He was also enormously prolific, producing a hundred and twenty-six books with titles like The Brinkmanship of Galahad Threepwood and A Pelican at Blandings Castle, plus over 50 plays and musical comedies, and hundreds of short stories.
He was the creator, among many other things, of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, in which an idiotic young man about town is saved from numerous disasters by his suave valet, Jeeves. They were splendidly incarnated by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in the Masterpiece Theatre series which ran for four seasons in the early 1990s. The running joke in these books – and it’s a joke as old as Shakespeare – is that the servant is smarter than the master, and not only smarter but also more of a gentleman.
P.G. Wodehouse, or “Plum” as he is affectionately known by his worldwide fans, created a fictional world in which a giant pig called the Empress of Blandings, a passion for newts, or the correct arrangement of a white tie was infinitely more important than death or taxes,– a world of idle young gentlemen and flighty women, suave servants and eccentric aunts. As a teenager, I badly wanted to enter that world - to be a wealthy young gentleman, meet some flighty women, and have a valet.
Wodehouse’s subject was always human comedy—the endlessly entertaining contrast between what we pretend to be and what we are.
It seems that nothing defeated his sense of humor, not even being interned by the Nazis during the war and being held at the mercy of their humorless, revengeful regime. He even made a joke of it later. The only figure of authority in Wodehouse is the ludicrous fascist Sir Roderick Spode, an amateur dictator who leads a group called the Black Shorts and is constantly humiliated. This kind of humor may seem trivial, and even silly. But there are times when laughter really is the best medicine.
There have been many tributes on this anniversary, but I’ll quote just this one from Aubron Waugh in The Oldie magazine. He wrote: “Wodehouse was the master of the great English joke, in which all seriousness – personal, religious, political – is reduced to absurdity...the best jokes completely ignore everything in which men of authority try to interest us.”
He was still busily writing subversive comedy in the year of his death at the age of 94.
Come back Plum, we really need you.
