It's almost impossible to write funny about humor, and anyone who writes seriously about it is
    doomed to come off as a fuddy duddy. E.B. White, a funny writer himself, once said that analyzing
    humor is like dissecting a frog, in that the thing tends to die in the process and the results will be
    interesting only to the purely scientific mind.
        -Andrew Ferguson, Divine Comedy : P.G. Wodehouse's perfect pitch

Two things the critics generally appear to agree on are that : (1) P. G. Wodehouse is one of the funniest writers in the English language; and, (2)  it's almost impossible to explain why.   Among the various authorities cited for the difficulty in analyzing humor are Evelyn Waugh and Sigmund Freud, themselves authors of hilarious fictions.  Suffice it to say, and I mean this in the very best sense, the enjoyments of the Jeeves and Wooster stories are much the same as those of the great TV sitcoms.  Wodehouse created these two great comic characters, surrounded them in each story with oddballs, plunked them all down in trying situations, and then had the inimitable Jeeves extract Bertie and his upper-class nitwit friends from their difficulties through various stratagems and diversions.  Though Andrew Ferguson and others deny that there is any deeper meaning or political content to the stories, it is at least notable that the finest young gentlemen in all of England are hopelessly overmatched by life unless Jeeves steps in to save them.  The resulting stories have a certain sameness to them--of course, just try watching ten episodes of Cheers in a row and see if it's still fresh and amusing in hour five--but read in moderation they are immensely enjoyable and their very familiarity becomes quite comforting.

(Reviewed:29-Mar-01)

Grade: (A+)