Wodehouse, Part the Second

You know how it is. You devote an entire blog post to talking about a man, you think he is out of your system...that your life can move forward without him at the center of it, always at the center; maybe you will even find new men to be interested in.

Not so when that man is P.G. Wodehouse. In my various Britishing of the Internet, I've dug up an article that Television's Hugh Laurie wrote for the Daily Telegraph in 1999 about the experience of reading Wodehouse. Since, after all, Laurie is a professional...


...I'll let him at it. Gear up for some serious Anglo (note the punctuation OUTSIDE of the quotation marks! Oh-ho, those Britons!). It's long but worth it.*

To be able to write about P. G. Wodehouse is the sort of honour that comes rarely in any man's life, let alone mine. This is rarity of a rare order. Halley's comet seems like a blasted nuisance in comparison.

If you'd knocked on my head 20 years ago and told me that a time would come when I, Hugh Laurie - scraper-through of O-levels, mover of lips (own) while reading, loafer, scrounger, pettifogger and general berk of this parish - would be able to carve my initials in the broad bark of the Master's oak, I'm pretty certain that I would have said "garn", or something like it.

I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a bookery nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests. I wore platform boots with a brass skull and crossbones over the ankle, my hair was disgraceful, and I somehow contrived to pull off the gruesome trick of being both fat and thin at the same time. If you had passed me in the street during those pimply years, I am confident that you would, at the very least, have quickened your pace.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.

But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.

I spent the following couple of years meandering happily back and forth through Blandings Castle and its environs - learning how often the trains ran, at what times the post was collected, how one could tell if the Empress was off-colour, why the Emsworth Arms was preferable to the Blue Boar - until the time came for me to roll up the map of adolescence and set forth into my first Jeeves novel. It was The Code of the Woosters, and things, as they used to say, would never be the same again.

The facts in this case, ladies and gentlemen, are simple. The first thing you should know, and probably the last, too, is that P. G. Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper. Fact number two: with the Jeeves stories, Wodehouse created the best of the best. I speak as one whose first love was Blandings, and who later took immense pleasure from Psmith, but Jeeves is the jewel, and anyone who tries to tell you different can be shown the door, the mini-cab, the train station, and Terminal 4 at Heathrow with a clear conscience. The world of Jeeves is complete and integral, every bit as structured, layered, ordered, complex and self-contained as King Lear, and considerably funnier.

Now let the pages of the calendar tumble as autumn leaves, until 10 years are understood to have passed. A man came to us - to me and to my comedy partner, Stephen Fry - with a proposition. He asked me if I would like to play Bertram W. Wooster in 23 hours of televised drama, opposite the internationally tall Fry in the role of Jeeves.

"Fiddle," one of us said. I forget which.

"Sticks," said the other. "Wodehouse on television? It's lunacy. A disaster in kit form. Get a grip, man."

The man, a television producer, pressed home his argument with skill and determination.

"All right," he said, shrugging on his coat. "I'll ask someone else."

"Whoa, hold up," said one of us, shooting a startled look at the other.

"Steady," said the other, returning the S. L. with top-spin.

There was a pause.

"You'll never get a cab in this weather," we said, in unison.

And so it was that, a few months later, I found myself slipping into a double-breasted suit in a Prince of Wales check while my colleague made himself at home inside an enormous bowler hat, and the two of us embarked on our separate disciplines. Him for the noiseless opening of decanters, me for the twirling of the whangee.

So the great P. G. was making his presence felt in my life once more. And I soon learnt that I still had much to learn. How to smoke plain cigarettes, how to drive a 1927 Aston Martin, how to mix a Martini with five parts water and one part water (for filming purposes only), how to attach a pair of spats in less than a day and a half, and so on.

But the thing that really worried us, that had us saying "crikey" for weeks on end, was this business of The Words. Let me give you an example. Bertie is leaving in a huff: " 'Tinkerty tonk,' I said, and I meant it to sting." I ask you: how is one to do justice of even the roughest sort to a line like that? How can any human actor, with his clumsily attached ears, and his irritating voice, and his completely misguided hair, hope to deliver a line as pure as that? It cannot be done. You begin with a diamond on the page, and you end up with a blob of Pritt, The Non-Sticky Sticky Stuff, on the screen.

Wodehouse on the page can be taken in the reader's own time; on the screen, the beautiful sentence often seems to whip by, like an attractive member of the opposite sex glimpsed from the back of a cab. You, as the viewer, try desperately to fix the image in your mind - but it is too late, because suddenly you're into a commercial break and someone is telling you how your home may be at risk if you eat the wrong breakast cereal.

Naturally, one hopes there were compensations in watching Wodehouse on the screen - pleasant scenery, amusing clothes, a particular actor's eyebrows - but it can never replicate the experience of reading him. If I may go slightly culinary for a moment: a dish of foie gras nestling on a bed of truffles, with a side-order of lobster and caviar may provide you with a wonderful sensation; but no matter how wonderful, you simply don't want to be spoon-fed the stuff by a perfect stranger. You need to hold the spoon, and decide for yourself when to wolf and when to nibble.

And so I am back to reading, rather than playing Jeeves. And my Wodehousian redemption is, I hope, complete. Indeed, there is nothing left for me to say, except to wish, as I fold away my penknife and gaze up at the huge oak towering overhead, that my history teacher could see me now.

*That's what she said.

The Peepes, the Peepes are Calling

Brandi proposed, and I heartily agreed to, concurrent blog posts on a Muppets skit. Watch it before reading either her post or mine. Have you seen it? Excellent. Let’s begin.

Like the miracle child of Oscar Wilde and Janeane Garofalo would be, this skit is predisposed to be funny. The Henson camp made three main choices to set it up: one, “O, Danny Boy” is one of those traditional songs that everyone knows, but no one actually knows the words to. Two, they picked three of the least intelligible Muppets to do the singing; and three, despite the fact that the odds are very much stacked against them, Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef are earnestly invested in performing this song as well as they can. As far as they are concerned, they are musicians of the highest caliber, drawing on the raw, mournful emotional well that “O, Danny Boy” is built upon. They are the conduits between us and the glorious weeping national identity of the Irish, and they commit themselves to it completely.

It is the commitment that wraps up the sketch in a bow for us: though the details and flourishes like Beaker’s high notes and Animal’s “O-boy-o-boy” refrain are hilarious, the whole package works because of the characters' motivations.

Bless the Muppet Show, and happy belated St. Patrick’s Day.

Fatal Hilarity

This week in "The Stranger," the column Dear Science tackles the subject of why laughter makes you weak. Cataplexy, or the "sudden physical collapse caused by experiencing strong emotions or laughter," is only fully present in subjects when they are truly laughing--not just exhaling or fake laughing.

Besides teaching me a new word, the column reminded me of the Monty Python "killer joke" sketch.* Michael Palin plays an early twentieth century joke-writer, who comes up with a joke so funny that it kills him. It then kills a handful of other people ("No one could read it...and live"), until the British translate it (one person doing one word at a time, of course) and use it as a weapon against the Germans, to great success. The joke itself is gibberish, of course, but that's what makes the concept so funny.

Turns out the idea of "fatal hilarity" has been around a while. Generally, it involves death by asphyxiation or some kind of cardiac arrest, which makes sense because laughter both elevates the heart rate and expands and contracts the thoracic diaphragm. For instance, the Greek stoic philosopher Chrysippus died of laughter in the 3rd century B.C., after giving his donkey wine and attempting to feed it figs...purportedly, anyway. It all seems very mythological, but think back to the last time you laughed so hard you could barely breathe. Creepy, right?

* This is the longer version from the episode "Whither Canada" on "Flying Circus," not the shorter version from the movie "And Now For Something Completely Different." The longer one is funnier but the shorter one is more beautiful (strangely enough).

Profile: P.G. Wodehouse

As some of my friends know, my mother is a hard-core Wodehouse pusher. She has a collection of used Wodehouse paperbacks specifically for getting people hooked (the first-edition hardback library doesn't leave the house, not even in the hands of immediate family). She keeps a framed picture of Wodehouse and his Dachshunds on the bookshelf in the study, with the rest of the family portraits; a list of all the Wodehouse books she already owns on her iPod nano so she doesn't double-purchase; and she has instructed the Duvall Used Bookstore to call her as soon as they get any Wodehouse in stock.

Once, before she was on the call list, she went to pick up my younger brother Adam from a friend's house in rural Woodinville. As they pulled out of the neighborhood, she felt she just HAD to go to the Duvall Bookstore. In spite of Adam's grumbling, she turned left instead of right and headed to Duvall...she just knew there was a Wodehouse on the shelf for her. She parked right in front of the door, and three minutes later she was back in the car with a $10 first edition. Adam was impressed enough to quit bellyaching, and we haven't doubted her supernatural abilities since.

So what is there to know about Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (or "Plum," as his friends called him)? He lived from 1881-1975 and in that time wrote ninety-six books, fifteen plays, some lyrics for about thirty musicals (like Anything Goes and Show Boat) and various screenplays. In 1939, he was living in France, and didn't bother leaving when the war broke out, as he wasn't very politically savvy. The Germans imprisoned him in 1940; he was interned in Belgium and later in Upper Silesia (now in Poland). His response was "if this is Upper Silesia, one wonders what Lower Silesia must be like..."

Because of his distance from Britain and its wartime experience, Wodehouse didn't entirely grasp the severity and somberness of the national mood. After being released, he recorded a series of radio broadcasts for the Germans about his internment. In retrospect, it is clear that he was just trying to be jolly--the tone is light and pokes fun at the Germans, and reflects the plucky morale of the Brits with whom he had shared his internment time. Goebbels, et al, however, knew Wodehouse's tone and depiction would come across as good P.R. for the Germans, and they played on his naivete.

In a cable to the editor of the "Saturday Evening Post," who had mentioned Wodehouse seemed "callous about England" in his broadcast, Wodehouse responded, "Cannot understand what you meant about callousness. Mine simple, flippant, cheerful attitude of all British prisoners; it was a point of honour with us not to whine." However, there was a huge and wrathful backlash in Britain: he was labeled a spy and a traitor in the press, accused of being a Hitler sympathizer, and the BBC banned all his work. A.A. Milne was one of his major critics, though both George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh came to his defense. Wodehouse was even investigated by MI5, and only in 2006 did they release the files clearing him of any wrongdoing. Wodehouse and his wife Ethel moved to New York after the war, deterred from going home by the seething dislike that was waiting for them, and by the fact that Leonora, Ethel's daughter and Wodehouse's step-daughter, died during surgery in London in 1944. He lived in the United States for the rest of his life.

His most famous characters are, of course, Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves, played to my extreme satisfaction by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry on the BBC and Masterpiece Theatre, long before both Fry and Laurie began popping up in shows on FOX. The Blandings Castle stories are also popular, about the daffy Lord Emsworth, his family, and his pig the Empress. Mr. Mulliner stories identify the characters not by name but by what they drink (i.e., Hot Scotch and Lemon). There are plenty more, and an overview can be found here. His writing style is wry and clever, rife with puns and bumbled situations, and characters named Freddie Threepwood and Gussie Fink-Nottle. However, he isn't the type to preen--reading his work, you can tell he just delights in being able to tell jokes, and he wants more than anything to make his reader happy. I emphatically encourage you to dabble in some Wodehouse. Carry On, Jeeves, a collection of short stories from 1928, is a wonderful gateway book. Plum (and my mother) just want you to be happy...won't you give in?

In the hope that you might, I'll leave you with some of Wodehouse's best one-offs:

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka bottle empty.
Jill the Reckless, 1921

He, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat. We stood for some moments like a couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other by chance at the dog races.
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, 1954

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
The Code of the Woosters, 1938

He was in the acute stage of that malady which, for want of a better name, scientists call the heeby jeebies.
Spring Fever, 1948

And perhaps the best book dedication in literature, from The Heart of a Goof (UK, 1926):

TO
MY DAUGHTER
LEONORA
WITHOUT WHOSE NEVER-FAILING
SYMPATHY AND ENCOURAGEMENT
THIS BOOK
WOULD HAVE BEEN FINISHED
IN
HALF THE TIME

New York Times Thing Two: on Screwball Comedies and Shoe Phones

Reading the Times article mentioned in the previous post, I started to feel a little overwhelmed. So many comedies coming out, how would I handle it? For any normal person, it will be a very full summer of new releases. But I, inexplicably, almost never see movies in the theater, so I'll be impressed with myself if I manage to do one a month. It isn't that I dislike seeing movies in the theater, it's just that it rarely occurs to me as a thing to do. And seeing as I've already promised my heart to one movie during the spring-summer season, I really will have to make an effort. But there are several movies that I think will be worth putting on my calendar.

One is the season kickoff movie (pun very much intended) "Leatherheads," directed by your friend and mine George Clooney. It is described in the New York Times article as "a screwball comedy about the early days of professional football." Ah, there's nothing that makes my heart sing like the term "screwball." Except perhaps the term "madcap." Clooney plays Dodge Connolly, a football star (a football player named "Dodge?" this is so promising) whose team loses their sponsor as the league faces collapse. Connolly brings college football star Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski, praise the lord) onto the team, who also happens to be America's Favorite Hero after single-handedly forcing many German soldiers to surrender in WWI. He seems too good to be true, and reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellwegger) starts poking around. In the meantime, she manages to get both Connolly and Rutherford to fall in love with her, and madcap antics ensue, I'm sure. Clooney is always such a joy to watch, I can't imagine "Leatherheads" being any less than clever and entertaining.

The other comedy I'm excited for this summer is "Get Smart." Not just because Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway are awesome, or because the poster is subtly funny (and subtle is not the usual kind of funny you see on posters), but because "Get Smart" is one of the first non-contemporary shows I can remember watching as a kid. Nick at Nite (with FX, back in that summer before 8th grade when all they played were old superhero shows) is largely responsible for my embarrassingly expansive knowledge of sitcoms from the Kennedy to the Carter administrations, and I'm always excited when it becomes obvious that other people in the world love the things I love. Which reminds me...won't one of my friends please start loving the new "Doctor Who" as much as I do?

Anyway, I loved the show "Bewitched," and subsequently did not love the movie "Bewitched." But I am an eternal optimist, and after all, "Get Smart" will lend itself much better to a film format than "Bewitched." TV's "Bewitched" worked in the same way "I Dream of Jeannie" did. The wacky magical blondes would discover or accidentally create a problem, do their best to fix it, inevitably bungle it, and - whew! - somehow put everything back together before Gladys Kravitz or Dr. Bellows could figure out what happened...packaged perfectly in serial format. Of course, "Get Smart" featured Maxwell getting into and out of scrapes in less than 30 minutes, too. But a secret spy agency (CONTROL) versus an ambiguously evil group (KAOS)*, with bumbling agents on each side? That practically begs to be feature-length.**

I should also mention that I'm also looking forward to Tina Fey's "Baby Mama," but because I trust that she and Amy Poehler will make something very funny, not because the previews have bowled me over. I thought "Mean Girls" was great, and those previews weren't great either. So I have a lot of hope. All in all, it's shaping up to be a fun summer.

*Those don't stand for anything, as far as I know. It's just Mel Brooks and his friends being funny.
**To be fair, in 1989 (19 years after the series ended), the creatively titled movie "Get Smart, Again!" came out, with the original stars Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. But I haven't seen it, and probably won't.

New York Times Thing One: on Writers' Strikes, Sequels, and Foreign Shores

Today's New York Times has a story about the slate of movies up for release between April and early July: evidently, about half the major releases will be comedy films. How come? NY Times:

The comic alignment probably owes more to the film industry’s internal dynamics as pictures in the same genre just happened to fall into place — and as executives, noting the success of “Wild Hogs” last March and “Superbad” last August, edged more comedies into the big-money months — than to any pulse moving through the nation at large. Whatever the source, it will test the audience appetite for a whole lot of what is usually a good thing.

Apparently the Times doesn't want us to read into this, or to start seeing patterns where there is only chaos. But that's no fun. Commencing with speculation! And hey, here's a good place to start: thanks to the writers' strikes in both years, comparisons between 1988 and 2008 are inevitable. And even though most of this summer's films were already steaming along by November of last year, let's jump wholeheartedly on that bandwagon.

The summer after the 1988 writers' strike gave us only four comedies that topped $100 million: "Coming to America," "Big," "Crocodile Dundee II" and the unparalleled "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" That summer also saw two R-rated comedies--"A Fish Called Wanda" and "Bull Durham"--that gave parents something to look forward to after, say, three trips with the kids to "Short Circuit 2" (at five years old, I was too young to care about seeing movies in the theater...you're welcome, Mom and Dad). And, despite dismal box office failures, let's not leave out: "Big-Top Pee-wee," "Caddyshack II," and "Arthur 2 On the Rocks," which, by the way, wins for best title for a sequel ever. And while they weren't comedies, it's worth noting "Poltergeist III," "Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master", "Rambo III," also came out, inspiring the 1988 New York Times (bless their online archive) to opine that "[t]he fate of most of the summer's sequels implies that sequels may no longer be an automatic way for movie studios to earn money." Har! Last year, the third "Pirates" installment made more than $300 million, which I believe was considered in the industry to be a slight let-down compared to take from the summer 2006 "Pirates," which brought in $135 million in its first three days. Just because a film flops at the box office it doesn't mean it wasn't good for the production companies. As long as they make a comfortable net profit, they're satisfied. That's why the sequel, no matter how inferior an exercise it is in filmmaking, isn't going anywhere any time soon - they are generally guaranteed to make money, just not as much as the original. It's original movies that are financially riskier. The NY Times makes this point:

The poor results [of "Walk Hard" and the opening of "Semi-Pro"] sent a shiver through an industry that likes comedies because they are generally less expensive than animated films like “Ratatouille” or effects-driven spectacles like “Transformers.” But though more cost-effective, comedies still need a healthy turnout by American moviegoers because most do not play well abroad.

Much of the world doesn't think we're funny. Or, maybe they don't care even if we are. Like Mark Twain pointed out, different cultures have different ideas of what constitutes comedy. "Ratatouille" broke all box office records in France for an animated film ($16 million in American dollars in the first week), and Le Monde declared it "one of the greatest gastronomic films in the history of cinema." It wasn't because Patton Oswalt has replaced Jerry Lewis in the hearts of the French - it was because "Ratatouille" was so painstaking in its ex-patriotism and delivery that both American and French sensibilities could be satisfied. I doubt the same could be said for the upcoming John C. Reilly/Will Ferrell vehicle "Step Brothers." Which isn't to say it won't be hilarious, of course. Here's hoping that the denizens of the American university Greek systems have steady jobs this summer--Hollywood is depending on them.

What Has Melodrama Ever Done to Deserve This?

When you want to make someone laugh but you don't want to try very hard, it is easy to rely on exaggeration. Hyperbole, overemphasis, or just plain yelling can—if handled properly—be a quick way to toss off a joke. Indulging in melodrama (in the modern, slang sense) works the same way. For instance:

Office worker 1: "The copier is out of toner, in case you were going to copy something."
Office worker 2 (clenches hand into fist, bites knuckles): "Nooooo!"

It might be enough to get a pity laugh, anyway, and it serves to keep the conversation friendly and light. Melodrama gets a bad rap, much of it undeserved and due to chronic underappreciation. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for instance, is gothic melodrama (and proto-sci fi!) in its Sunday best. Nevertheless, there are reasons melodrama is the butt of coworker jokes the world over.

This past weekend, I went to a performance of subUrbia by Eric Bogosian at Capitol Hill's tiny Odd Duck Theatre. Bogosian is a playwright and actor, perhaps most recognized nowadays as the put-upon Captain Danny Ross on “Law & Order: CI.” The play subUrbia premiered in 1994, then the movie opened in 1996 starring—as every movie did then—Giovanni Ribisi, Parker Posey, and Steve Zahn. Essentially, subUrbia is an angst-ridden, post-high-school woefest with some Pabst thrown in for lubrication. Hesitant protagonist doesn’t know what he wants from life, angry feminist girlfriend wants to move to New York to do performance art, feminist’s friend drinks herself to death, people have sex in the woods behind the convenience store, a rock star and his publicist show up, etc. Imagine that “Empire Records” had a crazy baby with “Clerks.”

In 2006, Bogosian “updated” his script for a run at New York's Second Stage Theatre. As far as I can tell, all he did was give the characters cell phones and modernize the music references. This was the version I saw on Saturday, and its awfulness, in all its vast intensity, was twofold. For one, the production was limited in scope by the tininess of the theatre company: limited budget, small house, rudimentary light and sound cues, and bad-to-middling acting. Some of the best theatre I’ve seen or worked on has been in tiny theatres with limited budgets, but no play can recover from being cast with mediocre actors.

Despite—and exacerbated by—the acting, the most unforgivable and egregiously terrible fold in the twofolded awfulness was the script. Eric Bogosian also wrote Talk Radio, which recently inspired the New York Times to declare that “[w]ith...Talk Radio, Liev Schreiber confirms his status as the finest American theater actor of his generation.” That the same man responsible for material of that caliber wrote subUrbia is baffling. SubUrbia positively drips with melodrama, and not in the good Lillian-Gish-in-“Broken-Flowers” way. Most of it was just annoying, but there were two particular lines that veered unintentionally into humor—that is, they were written and delivered exactly as if they were melodramatic jokes rather than dramatic exhalations:

Sooze: “Yeah, you know, when you called I thought, ‘there's a name from the past.’”

Pony: (he reaches out and strokes Sooze’s cheek) “Or the future…”

Jeff: “…Look, Tim, just go home, alright? Go home and sleep it off.”

Tim: “Well, what am I supposed to sleep off? My life?!”

Both exchanges sent my friend and coworker Kait and me into silent convulsions in the back row. The lines were intended to be dramatic, but were set up so easily (lazily?) that rather than mining the drama of the situation or revealing the inner thoughts of the characters, the dialogue remained shallow and self-referential. Really, both exchanges were built on puns. By their nature, puns pull you out of the story by being funny for funny's sake, rather than being funny as a part of character development or to move plot forward. So when a pun or a play on words is the basis for a dramatic interaction, we don't learn much about the characters, and everything immediately topples into a big soapy vat of melodrama on par with some of ABC's finest midday programming.

The characters of subUrbia didn't develop, no major problems were solved or created (except for that character that drank herself to death behind the convenience store, but that was to be expected), and I didn't learn anything about angry twenty-year-olds that I didn't already know. Of course, there is a plus side: now I've got a couple more good melodramatic jokes to share with my coworkers.