The Code Of The Woosters: The Funniest Book Ever Written?

In one of the most famous passages in The Code of the Woosters, Bertie Wooster, hiding from a dog on top of a chest of drawers, watches his valet Jeeves “skimming like a swallow onto the top of the cupboard.” The dog is dealt with, but the book they came to steal is not there. “Blast the book, Jeeves,” Bertie says. “What about this dog?” Jeeves replies, “Yes, sir.” The exchange is pure P.G. Wodehouse: a crisis rendered absurd by the sheer elegance of the language. Published in 1938, this novel is the third full-length Jeeves and Wooster book, and for many readers, it is the funniest novel ever written.

The Man Behind the Fantasy

P.G. Wodehouse was born in 1881 to parents who promptly returned to Hong Kong, leaving him with a nanny. He saw them for barely six months between the ages of three and fifteen. This “shattering emotional deprivation,” as biographer Robert McCrum calls it, is the key to Wodehouse’s entire project. He retreated into an imaginative fantasy world and never left. His books are a deliberate escape from reality—what he called “making the thing frankly a fairy story.” The 1930s, with its economic depression and rising fascism, barely intrudes. Wodehouse’s England is a sun-drenched, cocktail-fueled Neverland where the worst catastrophe is having to marry the wrong girl.