PG Wodehouse - Television Tropes & Idioms

What ho, Wodehouse!

Ineffectual gentry, cunning servants, horrendous aunts: all these were contributed to Christie Time by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (“Plum” to friends) (1881-1975), a prolific writer of light comedies, who was also responsible for many early Broadway musicals.

Beginning his career an occasional writer of topical verse for the newspapers, he first made a name as an author mainly of boys’ school stories. Wodehouse soon moved into the more lucrative field of light romance, and finally, in the late Twenties, moved on to the pure comedies which he preferred, and which he continued writing up to his last book, published posthumously as Sunset at Blandings.

In 1940, Wodehouse, while living at Le Touquet in France, was captured by German forces and sent to an internment camp, being given early release due to his already advanced age. Seeking to acknowledge his supporters, particularly those in America, he recorded a series of talks for German radio. It was reported by the Ministry of Information in the UK (where very few people heard the actual broadcasts) that Wodehouse had broadcast enemy propaganda and he was widely denounced as a traitor ―an absurd charge to anyone who has read the actual radio scripts. Wodehouse never returned to his native England, even to receive the knighthood that was granted him by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975. He died on St. Valentine's Day of the same year at the age of 93.

Wodehouse’s stories are generally tangles of zany schemes motivated by frustrated love. Reggie Worthington wants to be engaged to Betty Harte, but first must (a) disengage himself from Wilhelmina “Billie” Wreckham by pairing her up with Cyril “Bunny” Rabbington-Vole; (b) match Cyril’s jealous fiancée, Edith Pilsworth, with Billie’s jealous brother Freddie, who has been trying to keep all men away from his sister, and (c) blackmail Aunt Geraldine into allowing the engagements by holding hostage her prized 17th Century silver MacGuffin. Naturally, Betty, Billie, Cyril, Edith and Freddie all have devised their own zany schemes, each flawlessly assured to land Reggie in the soup. Wodehouse was, as can be seen, a master of farce, constructing farce, and pushing farce to the point where it curves around some nebulous point out in the dada hinterlands of space, wraps around the universe, and actually makes sense. More literally, a typical Wodehouse novel, as nonsensical and as breezy as it strives to be, is actually more tightly plotted, with more examples of Chekovs Gun, Chekhovs Armoury, and, indeed everything else Chekov ever touched, than all four Die Hard movies put together.

False identities are not compulsory, but they do seem to help. Mistaken identities, misinterpretations of events, secrets, blackmail, theft, ludicrous bets, breach of contract, and, of course, True Love also contribute.

Although Wodehouse penned several overlapping series, among them the "Oldest Member" golf stories, Archibald Mulliner's tall tales, the ongoing adventures of Psmith and the ever-hopeful scheming of Stanley Ukridge, today he is best remembered for two: Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings Castle.

Bertram Wilberforce 'Bertie' Wooster is a wealthy, pleasant and kind-hearted young man-about-London-town. Life would be just about perfect were it not for overbearing aunts, goofy friends wanting favours, and what can best be described as accidental engagements. Some days, it seems Bertie only has to smile at a girl for her to assume he’s trying to propose. Being the perfect gentleman — not to say rather dim — he never corrects them. Fortunately, Bertie’s über-valet (not butler, although as Bertie says “He can buttle with the best of them”), Reginald Jeeves, is as capable as Bertie is ineffectual. Jeeves always has a brilliant scheme to rescue Bertie and/or his friends, to the point where he's become a byword among the Drones Club, and the schemes always work perfectly - almost. The fact that Bertie is involved means that there is always a chance something will go wrong along the way.

Bertie is also the character who best embodies Wodehouse’s gift for language - Jeeves may call him 'mentally quite negligible', but he nevertheless expresses himself with a loopy eloquence unmatched among literary narrators. His fellow Drones can sometimes be nearly as articulate under stress... or other influences; in Right Ho, Jeeves, Gussie Fink-Nottle perhaps surpasses him during a alcohol-enhanced speech at the local grammar school prize-giving that is frequently described as the funniest sequence ever written in the English language.

Blandings, “a castle which has imposters the way other castles have mice,” is the home of the elderly and ineffectual Earl of Emsworth, which is routinely used by his many domineering sisters to imprison nieces or nephews intent on an unsuitable marriage. The would-be fiancée has to infiltrate the castle in disguise, often with help from the Earl’s ~~ne’er-do-well~~ honourable, capable brother Galahad Threepwood, and capable, sporting butler Beach (who actually is a butler), or less often his good friend Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, Earl of Ickenham (Uncle Fred to most), who aims always to spread sweetness and light, and persuade Emsworth to overrule his sister, typically by kidnapping his prize pig, Empress of Blandings, who is needed to win the Fattest Pig prize and beat out Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe’s own pig, Pride of Matchingham.

Bertie never goes to Blandings in the books, but these two series share several minor supporting characters, as do many of the books outside these series.

Wodehouse’s books have been the basis for a number of films and television series. The Blandings series has seen Clive Currie and Horace Hodges as Lord Emsworth in movie versions, and Fritz Schultz (in German), Sir Ralph Richardson, and Peter O’Toole on television. Arthur Treacher was well-known as the embodiment of Jeeves in the 1930’s, with David Niven (!) taking the part of Bertie Wooster; in the Sixties, Ian Carmichael (also known for playing Lord Peter Wimsey) as Bertie and Dennis Price as Jeeves. (It is on record that Wodehouse did not care much for any of these adaptations.) Wodehouse himself appeared in the last year of his life to introduce episodes of the well-regarded BBC Wodehouse Playhouse, which brilliantly adapted many of the Mulliner and the Golf stories. Most recently, the Bertie Wooster stories formed the basis of the popular early ’90s series Jeeves And Wooster, starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. Laurie’s role in Blackadder The Third was essentially a rehearsal for Bertie, though the show had Rowan Atkinson as an evil butler, rather than Stephen as the perfect valet.

In 2008, a josei manga adaptation of the Jeeves novels, called Please, Jeeves and drawn by Bun Katsuta, began serialization in Hana to Yume’s Melody.

This author’s works include examples of:

Accidental Athlete
Accidental Marriage
Batman Gambit — Psmith's occasional modus operandi. In Psmith in the City, his stays in his job by cultivating the rapport of his supervisor, despite his occasional flagrant disregard of the rules.
Brats With Slingshots — In Cocktail Time
Children Are Innocent — Subverted at every opportunity: if a child appears in a Wodehouse story, nine times out of ten s/he will be an obnoxious grubby little pest.
Christie Time
- However, as Christopher Hitchens and other critics point out, the attitudes and actions of Wooster & Co. are actually reflections of Edwardian comedy and mores (as in the stories of Saki) rather than the post-WWI era. The antics of the Drones become less funny when one considers that they would have had to avoid combat service to act as they do.
  - Not necessarily. The hero of The Indiscretions of Archie (1920), though as blithering an ass as any in Wodehouse, is definitely stated to have been a war veteran. Wodehouse himself addressed the accusation of his works being Edwardian in the (highly entertaining) preface to Joy In The Morning.
  - The novel Ring For Jeeves was released in 1953, and clearly set in the '50s: World War II is mentioned, and the post-war social change which caused the aristocrats to seek employment is a major plot point.
  - There is also the Bingo Little short story, “Bingo Bans The Bomb.” Wodehouse never intended his novels to be read as period pieces, and would update them from time to time, adjusting dates, commodity prices, and so on. The novels only seem Edwardian because Wodehouse himself was — an Edwardian gentleman who survived well into the late Twentieth century.
Cloudcuckoolander — Psmith of the eponymous series, and particularly Emsworth of Blandings Castle are notable examples. Honourable mention goes to Sacksby Senior of the novel Cocktail Time.
Sacksby: Have you ever been to Jerusalem?
Nanny Bruce: No, sir.
Sacksby: Ah. You must tell me about it sometime.
Cool Old Guy — the Wodehouseverse has a fair few of 'em. Uncle Fred and the Honourable Galahad are perhaps the best examples, regularly helping their younger acquaintences out of trouble, often with rather impressive Zany Schemes.
The Ditz — the majority of Wodehouse’s heroes
Dojikko — many male characters
Everything’s Messier With Pigs — the Empress of Blandings from the Blandings Castle stories.
Embarrassing First Name — Many members of the Drones Club go by nicknames; in Code of the Woosters "Chuffy" Chuffnell has gone his whole life concealing that his first name is Marmaduke.
- Also, poor Pelham Grenville Wodehouse himself. Rumour has it he refused knighthood for years to keep it a secret. One of his characters, a Mr. Trotter, avoids knighthood for much the same reason: fear of becoming "Sir Lemuel."
  - W. N. Connor, who publicly denounced Wodehouse at the behest of the Ministry of Information, made a point of sneering at Wodehouse’s high-falutin’ given names. To his credit, he apologised to Wodehouse after the war; to his credit, Wodehouse forgave him, but insisted on calling him “Walpurgis” (“Walp” for short) thereafter. (Connor’s actual first name was “William.”)
Evil Matriarch — the horrendous aunts.
- Or, in Lord Emsworth’s case, the horrendous sisters. Although they’re aunts to some of the young persons.
- As noted in the title of the last Bertie Wooster novel, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen.
Great White Hunter — Captain C.G. Biggar, Major Brabazon Plank.
Idiot Plot — a rare case of being done right.
I Have This Friend — the source of several of Bertie’s engagements (notably his on/off saga with Madeline Bassett) as the women he’s talking to always think he is talking about himself rather than proposing on behalf of one of his friends.
The Jeeves — Trope Namer.
Last Name Basis — Gally is at one point surprised to learn that Beach's name is Sebastian. Also, Bertie only very belatedly learns/realizes that Jeeves even has a first name.
MacGuffin — This is very often a diamond necklace, though perhaps the most famous is the Seventeenth-Century English (not Modern Dutch!) Silver Cow-Creamer, the attempted theft of which starts off an entire multi-book uproar in Bertie's love life. The Empress of Blandings herself and the French chef Anatole often serve as Living MacGuffins.
Noodle Incident — In-canon, during The Code of the Woosters. Specifically, "Eulalie." It’s revealed at the end of the book.
- More of an “incident,” perhaps, would be what happened to Uncle Fred “that day at the dog-races.” Or the story of the Prawns.
Opposites Attract — To Bertie’s constant annoyance, high-powered and intellectual women seem to find him, or at least the prospect of whipping him into intellectual shape, romantically irresistible.
Psmith Psyndrome — The Trope Namer
The Red Sonja — As, for example, in the short story "There’s Always Golf," where Clarice Fitch longs for a man to hit her with a riding-crop — used in Wodehouse to mock its serious use in the typical “sheik” romances of the period, and hilariously inverted in the Mulliner story, “A Voice From The Past.”
Shout Out — In his short story “Honeysuckle Cottage,” Wodehouse called his soupy heroine “Rose Maynard” as a tribute to W.S. Gilbert, whose plots he freely admitted to admiring more than Shakespeare’s.
Sophisticated As Hell — Bertie's narration style fits this, being an interesting combination of witty prose and attempts to quote from the classics, with what is essentially Buffy Speak.
Stealth Hi Bye — Jeeves, from a rather awed Bertie’s point of view. He frequently describes his valet as 'shimmering' from place-to-place.
Supreme Chef — Anatole, legendary cook to Bertie's Aunt Dahlia. All Dahlia has to do to bend Bertie to her will — up to and including stealing the aforementioned cow-creamer — is threaten him with banishment from her table.
Take That — After Wodehouse had been denounced by the orders of the Minister of Information, Alfred Duff Cooper, he was lambasted in the newspapers by his fellow-author, A.A. Milne. In The Mating Season, written while Wodehouse was being held by the Germans, Gussie Fink-Nottle on being arrested gives his name as “Duff Cooper”; in the same novel, Bertie Wooster is sickened by the prospect of reading Milne’s “Christopher Robin” poems publicly. Wodehouse retuned to the attack in “Rodney Has A Relapse,” in which reformed vers libre poet Rodney Spelvin writes smarmy poems about his toddler son, “Timothy Bobbin.”
Twenty Minutes Into The Future — Arguably, Ring For Jeeves, which takes place in the 1950’s (possibly due to the fact that it was based on a play by Wodehouse’s life-long friend, Guy Bolton).
Unreliable Narrator — Mr. Mulliner
Unusual Euphemism — One rather amusing example is the character Sir Roderick Glossop’s identification as a “nerve specialist” which it’s noted is just an elevated term for a “loony doctor”. Most of Bertie Wooster’s conversation can be viewed as an extended roller-coaster ride through this trope.
- In the introduction to The Code of the Woosters, Alexander Cockburn mercilessly mocks the “naso-labial curvature” term quoted by one analyst of the books. It describes a smile.
Upper Class Twit — Many of Bertie’s friends make him look like Jeeves by comparison.
- Lord Emsworth's sons, particularly Freddie Threepwood, are also rather airheaded.
Xanatos Gambit — Jeeves’ schemes to save Bertie often border on this trope.
Zany Scheme — Psmith is king of this.
- And Jeeves, albeit in his case the zany is motivated mostly by the implausibility of the situation Bertie & co. have gotten into in the first place.

John C Wright

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