Hugh Laurie: Wodehouse Saved my Life (1999)
pgwodehousebooks.com
pgwodehousebooks.com
Wooster is a rich nitwit, Jeeves is his valet. They get into impossible situations usually involving Wooster or one of his inept friends getting into trouble with the law or a woman and have to get bailed out in some equally impractical way.
The amazing thing about Wodehouse is that his stories came almost entirely out of his head and secondhand sources. By no means did he lead the kind of life described in his peerless stories.
It's interesting that you say "notches below the rest." That literally may have been true, given that Wodehouse measured how many times he'd revised a page by pasting it higher and higher on his study wall (or some wall somewhere, don't remember exactly what I read). Pages started at the bottom near the floor. A page was ready to release when it had attained a certain height.
Some of the earlier Psmith stories are in the public domain:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6753 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2607 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10586
While people are recommending stuff, yes watch J & W, and Fry and Laurie's comedy shows, both are brilliant, but do not miss Blackadder. (Well, skip season 1 until and if you become a hard core fan as even us UK fans find that one a bit hard going.) Worth watching S2,3,4 as not only are these two in it, but you're going to see Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean and Jonny English) at his arguably best, and many other brilliant UK comic actors. (Actually, IIRC, S3 and S4 are the ones that bring him to the fore. In fact Im not sure he was in S2 at all. Cant remember.... Im old!!!!) Blackadder S4 is truly an awesome comedy series. Its worth watching fully and properly just to see how they ended it. Do not skip the series for the ending, you will ruin its power. Let it build up, then tear you to pieces.
Personally speaking is cracked me up when House first started and the US treated him like a proper normal actor, while we in the UK knew his comic roles. But, brilliant for Hugh as he could almost start a new career as a serious proper actor with out the "baggage" of comedy. You guys, if you haven't already, now have the sheer delight of checking out his back catalogue.
I was going to add some YouTube links, but as I was going through the site looking for some gems, I realised I would end up adding so many links I would look like an automated spammer. So, you know, hit YouTube, search, and loss a few (un)productive hours laughing :)
Oh and thank you America for giving him a chance to be a proper actor. I don't think it would have happened in the UK. Type-casting and all that.
Hugh Laurie was introduced in season 3. The role he played was played by Tim McInnerny in season 1 and 2.
When I wan in high school our local public television satiation (WILL) would run episodes of several 1970s and 80s british sitcoms. Among them were Blackadder, Are you being Served? and Fawlty Towers.
That is a beautiful typo.
Also, reading Wodehouse will improve your life. Or make you smile. He's just so brilliant. I'll happily be flamed for submitting articles about such matters.
I find it sad that, comedy is not considered nearly as respectable. Jeeves would certainly do his typical cough - if an Author of comedy is considered for Nobel prize in literature.
Most older nerds grew up around comedy like monty python, stephen fry plus books, D&D, Warhammer etc etc. Even if you didn't watch much of them you at least knew of them and had heard the catch phrases etc.
We used BBS's for communicating but i was really expensive as it was a phone call, often interstate.
There was no such thing as reddit or the internet, the memes were catch phrases from these collective activities and back then it wasn't cool to be a nerd. No such thing as BroGrammers back then.
Hugh Laurie was a major influence for a older generation of nerds, which is why it is front page.
""" Who are your favorite authors? Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, P. G. Wodehouse, Ruth Rendell.
...
Master? Great genius? Oh yes. One of the most blissful joys of the English language is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever, one of the guys on the very top table of all, was a jokesmith. Though maybe it shouldn’t be that big a surprise. Who else would be up there? Austen, of course, Dickens and Chaucer. The only one who couldn’t make a joke to save his life would be Shakespeare. ...
We Wodehouse fans are very fond of phoning each other up with new discoveries. But we may do the great man a disservice when we pull out our favourite quotes in public, like “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes,” or “. . . like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag” or (here I go again) my current favourite, “He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk” because, irreducibly wonderful though they are, by themselves they are a little like stuffed fish on a mantelpiece. You need to see them in action to get the full effect. There is not much in Freddie Threepwood’s isolated line “I have here in this sack a few simple rats” to tell you that when you read it in context you are at the pinnacle of one of the most sublime moments in all English literature.
Shakespeare? Milton? Keats? How can I possibly mention the author of Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin and Pigs Have Wings in the same breath as these men? He’s just not serious! He doesn’t need to be serious. He’s better than that. He’s up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness. From the Introduction to Sunset at Blandings (Penguin Books)
"""
Give me Shakespeare for tragedy, Shaw for wit and Wodehouse for light-hearted comedy with some bacardi and coke, and maybe an island in tbe caribbean any day. ( I prefer a warm bed for my nights though ;)
As the case shall be discovered, much in our circle is derived from sources beyond our own immediate horizons. P.G. Wodehouse, though not new, nor hackerly, certainly demonstrates a prowess with language most indoubtedly motivated by an inner force, a muse as you wish, which allows its effect upon the minds of many.
In short, if one cannot see P.G. Wodehouse in hackerdom, then it may well be simply because one has not read a single of his words. I encourage such circumstances to be resolved, post-haste, lest ye miss the beat of certain drums whose temper has wrought much upon our field ..
MY EYES, MY EYES!
There's also the litmus test of the Wodehouse phrase: "The unpleasant, acrid smell of burnt poetry."
Quotes filched, after a short search, from http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7963.P_G_Wodehouse , which holds some pages of good ones. Unfortunately, a few are poorly sourced and look like cuckoo eggs to me.
In comparison I opened a random nytimes article from its frontpage: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/us/politics/secret-donors-...
It took 4 seconds until the text was even shown and the site did not stop loading until 12s after I started. And now it seems to send a heartbeat every 60s to some tracker to tell it that I am still on the page.