Line #13 Literature/RightHoJeeves


1	[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_0717_2.JPG]]
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3	''Right Ho, Jeeves'' is a 1934 Literature/JeevesAndWooster novel written by Creator/PGWodehouse.
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5	Bertie Wooster comes home from vacation in Cannes to find that his valet, Jeeves, is giving romantic advice to Bertie's old school chum, Gussie Fink-Nottle. Gussie has fallen in love with Madeline Bassett, an recent platonic acquaintance of Bertie's, but is far too shy to share his feelings with her. When Jeeves' idea to have Gussie make an impression on Madeline by dressing up as {{Satan}} for a costume party goes wrong, due to Gussie's own bumbling, Bertie decides that Jeeves has lost his knack for problem solving and decides to take Gussie under his own wing.
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7	Meanwhile, Bertie's Aunt Dahlia is demanding Bertie come to her mansion, Totleigh Court, in order to present the end-of-term prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. Fortunately for Bertie, Madeline Bassett is staying with Aunt Dahlia and her husband Tom, which gives Bertie an excuse to send Gussie instead.
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9	Eventually, however, Bertie is forced to come to Totleigh Towers anyway. His cousin Angela (daughter of Dahlia and her husband Tom) has broken up with her fiancé, Tuppy Glossop, another one of Bertie's old school chums. And Bertie also must figure out how to coax Tom into paying for Aunt Dahlia's insolvent women's magazine, ''Milady's Boudoir''. Bertie, who is miffed at Jeeves for disparaging Bertie's mess jacket, insists on taking all these tasks on himself rather than asking his hypercompetent valet. Disaster ensues.
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11	This is the only Jeeves and Wooster novel that is available in the public domain.
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13	In 2018 Castalia House published a comic book adaptation by Creator/ChuckDixon under the Arkhaven Comics imprint. A digital version of the comic is being published at Platform/{{Arkhaven}} and can be read [[https://www.arkhaven.com/comics/comedy/right-ho-jeeves here]].
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16	!!Tropes:
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18	* AccidentalProposal: Bertie has a supernatural skill at blundering into these. In this novel he tries to argue Gussie's case to Madeline, only to accidentally make her think he's proclaiming his own love.
19	* AlcoholInducedStupidity: Gussie's epic rant to the students at the grammar school while tanked up to his eyeballs is a classic example of this.
20	* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: Bertie mentions a girl who criticized his "manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus".
21	* BreakTheHaughty: The central plot driver of ''Right Ho, Jeeves''. Besides Jeeves' "pig-headed" opposition to his fashionable new mess jacket, Bertie is completely fed up with his friends and relatives trampling over ''him'' in their rush to get his ''valet's'' advice. He forbids Jeeves from interfering again and takes everyone's problems on himself. Bertie repeatedly points out the superiority of his ideas to Jeeves' throughout the novel, but they're predictably disastrous for all who implement them. By the time he's forced to haul Jeeves in to fix things, an entire house party is locked outside on a dark night. Jeeves sends Bertie on an eighteen-mile bicycle ride for the only available key... not before smirkingly recounting an anecdote about a horrible bicycle accident. After finding out his journey has been for nothing, a sore and weary Bertie returns home to find everyone celebrating how ''Jeeves'' has solved all their troubles. It turns out that Bertie was a cat's-paw in Jeeves' scheme to focus everyone's anger away from each other, and when Jeeves reveals that he's also "accidentally" ruined the mess jacket, Bertie has no choice but to let it all go so long as Jeeves makes him an omelet.
22	* CannotSpitItOut: Gussie's main problem. At one point he nearly bares his soul to Madeline only to find himself talking about his main hobby, newts.
23	* ChekhovsGun: "We stayed at Cannes about two months, and except for the fact that Aunt Dahlia lost her shirt at baccarat and Angela nearly got inhaled by a shark while aquaplaning, a pleasant time was had by all." The shark is the indirect cause of Angela's severed engagement later in the novel, and Dahlia losing all that money becomes important as well in regards to keeping her newsletter in business.
24	* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: Bertie relates Jeeves the descent and fall of Augustus Fink-Nottle, from Newts as a harmless hobby to a dark obsession:
25	-->'''Bertie:''' ... Well, Gussie has always been a slave to them. He used to keep them at school.\
26	'''Jeeves:''' I believe young gentlemen frequently do, sir.\
27	'''Bertie:''' He kept them in his study in a kind of glass-tank arrangement, and pretty niffy the whole thing was, I recall. I suppose one ought to have been able to see what the end would be even then, but you know what boys are. Careless, heedless, busy about our own affairs, we scarcely gave this kink in Gussie's character a thought. We may have exchanged an occasional remark about it taking all sorts to make a world, but nothing more. You can guess the sequel. The trouble spread,\
28	'''Jeeves:''' Indeed, sir?\
29	'''Bertie:''' Absolutely, Jeeves. The craving grew upon him. The newts got him. Arrived at man's estate, he retired to the depths of the country and gave his life up to these dumb chums. I suppose he used to tell himself that he could take them or leave them alone, and then found—too late—that he couldn't.\
30	'''Jeeves:''' It is often the way, sir.
31	* GibberishOfLove: Befalls Gussie Fink-Nottle when he attempts to propose to Madeline Bassett.
32	--> '''Jeeves:''' Mr. Fink-Nottle was overcome by a sudden nervousness, sir... He began to deliver a dissertation on the newt, its care in sickness and in health...
33	* GratuitousFrench: The hyper-intelligent Jeeves is prone to this.
34	--> '''Jeeves''': You feel that Miss Angela's strictures should not be taken too much ''au pied de la lettre'', sir?\
35	'''Bertie''': Eh?\
36	'''Jeeves''': In English, we should say "literally".
37	* HangoverSensitivity: Bertie is nursing a hangover when Aunt Dahlia comes barging in to demand that he visit her estate.
38	* IntoxicationEnsues: Gussie Fink-Nottle (a teetotaler and all-around spineless goof) gets roped into giving a speech for the award ceremonies at a local grammar school. To "stiffen his fibers", he drinks a great deal of whisky, and then a jug-full of orange juice which both Bertie and Jeeves have independently spiked with alcohol.
39	* KissingCousins: Bertie tries to use this as a defense when he finds out Tuppy thinks he's in love with Angela, saying "isn't there something in the book of rules about a man may not marry his cousin? Or am I thinking of grandmothers?"[[note]]Actually, marrying your first cousin was legal in England at the time.[[/note]]
40	* LiquidCourage: Goes wrong when Gussie follows Bertie's advice and downs a whole lot of whisky, then drinks all the orange juice that unbeknownst to him Bertie spiked with gin. He is thus drunk as a lord when it's time to give a speech at the school.
41	* LoveAtFirstSight: Tuppy confesses that this happened when he met Angela.
42	--> "I fell in love with her in a couple of minutes. I worshiped her immediately we met, the pop-eyed little excrescence."
43	* LoveInformant: Bertie tries to do this with Madeline for Gussie, but botches it horribly.
44	* MakeUpIsEvil: When Tuppy and Angela quarrel, he says he disapproves of this habit of modern girls, putting on make-up.
45	* MaskOfConfidence: Jeeves invokes this trope advising Gussie Fink-Nottle, who CanNotSpitItOut to Madeline Basset, to get a Captain Pirate costume to a costume ball Madeline has invited Gussie. We will never know if it would have worked, because Gussie [[TooIncompetentToOperateABlanket prefers a Mephistopheles costume to the pirate costume, and he gives the taxi the wrong address and his costume has not pockets where to save money and he expends the night at jail]].
46	* MeetCute: Gussie says he met Madeline for the first time when she was out walking her dog, and she happened to run into him. The dog had a thorn in its foot, which Gussie extracted.
47	* MidnightSnack: Tuppy Glossop the gourmand has been fighting with his vegetarian fiancée Angela. Bertie advises him to pretend not to be hungry at dinner, so Angela will think he is pining over her--and then nip down to the kitchen while everyone's asleep and have some steak-and-kidney pie. Unfortunately, though, what with [[ContrivedCoincidence one thing and another]] the entire household ends up coming down to the kitchen at midnight. Angela uses the midnight snack as even further evidence of Tuppy's gluttony, and he doesn't even get time to eat it.
48	* MistakenDeclarationOfLove: Bertie manages to give Madeline Bassett the impression that he loves her. This turns out to be a ChekhovsBoomerang throughout the series, as Madeline has a habit of going back to Bertie whenever her relationships go wrong, much to Bertie's horror.
49	* NarrativeProfanityFilter: Bertie never swears. So when Dahlia hears that Anatole is angry again after she worked so hard to calm him down, she lets loose with "a rich hunting-field expletive."
50	* OffscreenTeleportation: A RunningGag throughout the series has Bertie being thrown off by Jeeves appearing or disappearing in a room without being seen to enter or leave. In this novel, he "just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas."
51	* PainToTheAss: Bertie's eighteen-mile bike ride results in "physical anguish in the billowy portions" that he bemoans throughout the last chapter. One would be tempted to call it karma for his novel-length power trip and the trouble it caused everyone... if the more painful and humiliating side effects of the plan hadn't been clearly engineered by a vengeful Jeeves.
52	* RescueRomance: Jeeves suggests this as a plan, if Bertie sets off the fire alarm then the disentangled couples will rush to each others' aid and reentangle, dis-entangling Bertie and saving Aunt Dahlia's magazine. His actual plan is somewhat more complex however, involving making an ass of Bertie as a key step.
53	* SeparatedByACommonLanguage: Bertie observes that Aunt Dahlia's French chef Anatole had been in service with an American family for several years before coming to work for her. Bertie pronounces Anatole's English as "fluent, but a bit mixed." In the next paragraph, Anatole mixes up American slang ("Hot dog!", "hit the hay", "mad as a wet hen") with British ("jolly well", "blighters").
54	* SplittingPants: Gussie's terror of delivering the prizegiving speech is heightened by memories of a similar occasion he and Bertie attended as schoolboys, where the speaker bent over to pick up a book and his trousers split. Now he's convinced that [[LaserGuidedKarma the same thing will happen to him]].

Context Literature / RightHoJeeves