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So, for a project I'm reading a lot of Wodehouse. I'd read a lot of it before, but this time more analytically. An interesting thing is just how much he gets away with by being slow and funny. There's a scene in one of his books where Bertie is grumpy, then finds a rubber duckie. There's a whole paragraph by Bertie describing how to operate the duck. Seems like a complete throwaway gag, and an excellent one, BUT the real trick is he did a bit-flip on Bertie, who goes from sad to happy.

I think what was likely going on is that for plot purposes he needed Bertie's mood to change. In most authors' hands, and even Wodehouse's in most cases, the move here is to rejigger prior plots to arrive at the correct mental state. But because Wodehouse is so funny and clever, he's able to essentially just assert the mood change, and you don't even notice. In fact, you'd like to read more.

I think one of the keys with Wodehouse is that his characters are much more like punch cards than people. Like, for a given character their personality, motives, and the state of their relationships to the other characters could be listed with complete thoroughness on a postcard. They are uncomplex. What scenes do is they alter a number of states on each character, e.g. who they're in love with, are they in a good mood, etc.

@ZachWeinersmith Do you think the punch-card property actually contributes to the comic effect of the stories? Thinking of Henri Bergson's theory of comedy emerging from "the mechanical layered on the living".

(The simplicity of it might help make the stories comforting to read.)

Zach Weinersmith

@mattmcirvin Oh yeah, definitely. I think farce has to have stupid shallow characters who never evolve.