The Original Show About Nothing: Jeeves and Wooster

Of course it’s a misattribution or malapropism or maladroit miscommunication or some other whatsis to refer to Seinfeld as The Show About Nothing. That whole idea is an in-joke that got embedded deeply into the meta information of the show itself. The sitcom was based on the idea of demonstrating how comedians found their material in ordinary life, and then showcasing them (Seinfeld) delivering that material in its finished form.

But still. The joke stuck, and became a metonym for the whole enterprise. It kinda works, because by design, no one on the show learns anything from their misadventures, never grows up, never matures. They never alter their behavior after learning any lessons delivered from their trip through their pampered version of the school of hard knocks. Their woes are trivial. While hundreds of people pass through their warped little world, the principals (and their principles) don’t change one whit.

By those standards, it is a show about nothing, but it’s not the first. P.G.Wodehouse wrote the first show about nothing I know about, even though it wasn’t a show when he thought it up. It was a series of published stories. Jeeves and Wooster adumbrated the show about nothing.

If you’re not familiar with the stories, Bertie Wooster is a somewhat dimwitted wastrel semi-aristocrat flouncing around London and various posh country estates in Great Britain between the two wars. Jeeves is his wise and hyper-competent manservant. This kind of turnabout is common now, but it was fresh when Wodehouse started it. Wodehouse began contemporaneously with the subject matter, but he somehow kept it going until 1974, through 35 short stories and 11 novels. Bertie never learns anything, Jeeves never forgets anything, they never get any older, time never passes, and nothing much happens throughout the whole enchilada. It’s still funny, and always will be, because Wodehouse was a funny writer.

There have been various attempts to dramatize Jeeves and Wooster over the years, including radio programs, stage plays, and TV shows. The best known is probably Jeeves and Wooster from ITV back in 1990. It still holds up pretty well. You can find all of them on YorubaTube if you poke around. Here’s the entire first episode:

There is a problem, although it’s something of a quibble. Wodehouse is not well-suited for dramatization. Hugh Laurie, who plays Wooster in the last clip, had this to say about Pelham Grenville:

The facts in this case, ladies and gentlemen, are simple. The first thing you should know, and probably the last, too, is that PG Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper. Fact number two: with the Jeeves stories, Wodehouse created the best of the best.

He’s wrong about some of that, but that’s not the problem I’m describing. Mark Twain is the funniest writer ever to put words on paper, with daylight second. However, both Twain’s stories and Wodehouse’s tales of misbegotten engagements, drunken layabout lords, and theiaphobia have the same drawback when viewed as dramaturgy. It’s the way the stories are told that’s humorous. Both authors have a masterful technique of making written works that are funny to read. While the situations they describe can vary from mundane to ridiculous, the action is in the delivery of the language. The stuff that happens might be comic, but the words make it hilarious.

Here’s two examples I’ve included in an old essay called The Dirty Dozen Best First Lines in Literature. First, P.G.:

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse — The Luck of the Bodkins

Then Twain:

This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room, separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the manure-pile.
Christian Science — Mark Twain

Timing is just about everything when you’re trying to say something funny. Neither of those examples is a “joke.” Both writers hated jokes, although they used them to good effect by telling terrific jokes after first describing them as bad jokes, and kind of apologizing for them. For example, Bertie hears someone describing seeing Garrick playing Hamlet at the Odeon, (I’m doing this from memory, the details might be slightly different) and asks, “Who won?”, while no one laughs.

The timing in either of those opening lines is the key. You’re strung along, trying to keep up, and amused along the way by the tortured language and the occasional, offhand-sounding chuckler, then hit with the crusher at the end. They’re both great at it, The best ever, that I’ve ever seen, in print.

But bad books generally make the best movies. Twain’s characters have been portrayed plenty of times in movies and on TV, to poor effect. Huckleberry Finn is the Ur-Novel in American letters, but the story alone is not that interesting without the lively text. And while Jeeves and Wooster is about as good as cable TV shows get, it never achieves the drollery and amusement of P.G.’s writing.

My point is kind of borne out by the way the Jeeves and Wooster series was developed. Like most good British TV, there were only a few seasons with a handful of episodes each season. They still had trouble filling the hours. They mashed handfuls of stories together to pass the time, and then started making up dreadful ideas of their own, like putting Jeeves in drag. They discovered pretty quickly that there was a set of encyclopedias-worth of funny text, but only a handful of funny, televisable things in the stories.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Jeeves and Wooster still holds up is that the paradox of the helpless aristocrat and the competent, long-suffering servant is only half the paradox. It works just as well reversed, because Jeeves, while a servant, personifies rock-ribbed traditional, conservative Great Britain. He reads Spinoza in his room on his day off. But ultimately, he’s not in charge. Bertie may be a member of the upper crust, but he’s always ready to try every passing fad in amusements and clothing. He’s a kind of imbecilic gadfly. He never reads anything but a menu or a racing form, but somehow his class of nitwits are ostensibly in charge of an empire.

Neither Bertie or Jeeves has much of anything to do with the working class. Regular workers barely even enter the stories as props. It’s a struggle between two factions over who will set an example for the rest of the kingdom. In the episode above, Bertie tells Jeeves that he’s not the sort of man who becomes a slave to his valet. It’s amusing to watch him do it anyway, in a show about nothing.