I'm trying to understand why this is on the front page, and what it means.
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 ;)
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.
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 ..