Wodehouse

A commenter in the post immediately below reminds us of a great Wodehouse line; perhaps the harshest condemnation the mild-mannered Bertie ever directs at an interlocutor to his face. If you haven’t read anything by the man with the greatest ear for comic dialog the 20th century had to offer, do yourself a favor. Almost any of his 90+ novels will do, but the aforementioned The Code of the Woosters is an excellent place to start, along the The Inimitable Jeeves, Jeeves and the tie that Binds, and Pigs have Wings. Amongst short stories, I particularly recommend “Crime Wave at Blandings” and “The Great Sermon Handicap” (in which a ring of gamblers wager on which local vicar will give the longest sermon on any given Sunday, followed by various efforts by the unscrupulous to fix the competition).

If you want a taste, the glories of the information superhighway include a random Wodehouse quote generator. Check it out. A couple of the gems I got:

As a rule, you see, I’m not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across premieval swamps and Uncle James’s letter about Cousin Mabel’s peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle (“Please read this carefully and send it on Jane”) the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It’s one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor–and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.

She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a greivance and a ray of sunshine.