P.G. Wodehouse is one of the great humorists in the English language. His works still sell in vast numbers more than a hundred years after the first were published, and he has created a cultural icon in the character of Jeeves. The secret to this vast success doesn’t lie in the plots of his novels, but their style.
Auberon Waugh has compared Wodehouse’s novels to Roman Comedy, and called them an English form of the commedia del’arte. In other words, like the plays of Terence and Plautus and the improvised drama of the Italian commedia del’arte, Wodehouse relies of a series of stock situations and recognisable characters. In Old Comedy these include the wily slave and the love-lorn young man, and the commedia del’arte has its Pierrot, Harlequin and Capitano. In Wodehouse the reader can recognise recurring types such as the foolish young man about town, the serious young woman, the over-bearing father, the jealous macho lover, and others.
The settings of Wodehouse’s novels also tend to be drawn from a set of standard locations: a rural village, a London street, an estate in the country, a garden at sunset. He described his books as “making a sort of musical comedy” out of life, and his settings do feel at times like old stage sets that have been pulled on to serve another show.
To most novelists, suggesting that they used a set of stereotypes and lacked originality would be a damning criticism. But Wodehouse’s appeal doesn’t lie in his subject matter: it is his style which keeps readers coming back for more. When Bertie Wooster wants to express worry about going to the village of Steeple Bumpleigh, he describes it as a place “to be steered sedulously clear of”, and goes on “I don’t know if you have ever seen one of those old maps where they mark a spot with a cross and put ‘Here be dragons’, or ‘Keep ye eyes skinned for hippogriffs’, but I had always felt that some such kindly warning might well have been given to pedestrians and traffic with regard to this Steeple Bumpleigh.”
The fact that Steeple Bumpleigh is pretty much the same as all the other villages in Wodehouse’s novels doesn’t matter, when it is described with such verve. Wodehouse’s plots and ideas might be cliches, but his words never are. A few lines later, he suggests that Steeple Bumpleigh is picturesque and rural by saying “you couldn’t have thrown a brick in it without hitting a honey-suckle-covered cottage or beaning an apple-cheeked villager.” Wodehouse’s writing could be described as “poetic” in the positive sense: not because it is flowery and affected, but because it throws out attention back from the object being described to the glorious texture of the description.
