Ep 727 - My Man Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse

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Hey everybody, welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig. My name is Andrew. My man, Jeeves. My man. My man Jeeves. I say my man, you say Jeeves. All the Woodhouse fans out there get it. Welcome to our book podcast.

where each week one of us reads a book and tells the other person about it, usually a book we haven't read before. Maybe it's a book you've read before. Who knows? I don't know you, but I'm glad that you're here listening. Andrew, I do know you. Mm-hmm. What book did you read on this week's podcast? I did read My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. Woodhouse. We've gotten people very authoritatively saying that it's every possible permutation.

I watched some videos of British people saying Woodhouse. British people can be wrong, Craig. I don't know if you knew this about them. He's British. Fair enough. Listen, there was at least one time when they were wrong. Back in 1776. Oh my goodness. And Emma saying on YouTube. Emma saying, not Emma saying, it's a little bit. She says Woodhouse. Emma saying lies, so. Emma's saying predates our current AI debacle. But it's still weird text-to-speech.

stuff that seems like it doesn't i'm not i don't trust it i i trust i've had i've had things countermand emma saying enough times that I don't take it as gospel if I can only find it on MSA. I feel fine going with Woodhouse because Stephen Fry, who... played Jeeves a bunch, says Woodhouse. Okay, you know, I can accept that. Maybe I should have led with that rather than MSA.

Yeah, no, Emma Sang is not authoritative, but Stephen Fry, I believe him. You and I have never read Jeeves before. We've never read Jeeves before. It's amazing to me that I never really stopped to think where the... idea of a person named jeeves being the ideal like manservant yeah i just thought it was kind of a culturally uh-huh agreed upon thing that we had all picked up somewhere and susanna too when i said that this is what i was reading

I said it was called My Man Jeeves. And she said, oh, is it about a butler? And I'm like, yeah, it is, in fact, where that came from. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a thing that somebody invented. And it just passed into. like a kleenex or xerox like yes common use well we'll talk about the search engine that i think also like for at least for people of our vintage

Like hit at the exact right spot where a thing got created called with the name Jeeves on it and was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. I'm 10. That makes perfect sense. Jeeves is. At least some of these stories are public domain. I read the copy of this on the Project Gutenberg, which we've talked about a lot for some of the older stuff that we've read. And then a lot of these stories, sort of like the...

It's sort of like the Bradbury stuff we just read, except this was a lot easier to find, were sort of revised or included again in later. Carry on Jeeves. Including some stories that were not about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves that were doctored to be about.

Bernie Wooster and Jeeves. Okay. Because all of these short stories are about like weird little farcical situations. Yeah. That people get themselves into. But Jeeves is not. Jeeves is in like half of them. Yes. Sure. And the other half of them are like a... prototype of birdie wooster jeeves's uh employer but he doesn't really have a butler most of the time yes okay well let's talk about mr woodhouse pg

a.k.a. Sir Pelham Grenville Woodhouse, a.k.a. Plummy, as some folks called him. I thought it meant that he was a guy that you needed to... Have your parents around. Well, it's funny. It's funny you say like, oh, wow, somebody had to come up with the idea for somebody for Jeeves. Somebody had to come up with the idea for putting those letters together to say, you know, dangerous situations. Yeah.

That was P.G. Woodhouse. Woodhouse. They said, whoa, P.G. Woodhouse. In 1881 in England, he was born. And he died. In 1975 in New York State in the United States. I just made a note. Those dates, we cover a lot of authors on this show, and sometimes this hits me and sometimes it doesn't. 1881 to 1975 is just a very interesting span of years to me. Yeah.

he was starts out he starts out knowing stuff that only exists in history books for us and for people several decades older than us but then he also knew like what watergate was Was alive when Charles Darwin and Jesse James were still alive. But he also could have listened to the debut albums by Donna Summer, Bad Company, Kansas, and Kiss, just to name a few.

He could have. He could have been a big Kansas fan. Could have been a big KISS fan. Just saying. P. Gene Simmons Wodehouse. His father was a magistrate in Hong Kong and his mother... I was back in England when he was born. He was shipped back to England at the age of two after a brief stay in Hong Kong and then grew up getting passed around from aunt to aunt. As this happens to some of us.

Ants occupy a strange position in this book that we can talk about. They're usually scary authority figures. A real Roald Dahl situation. Yes, scary, joyless authority figures. He was educated at Dulwich College in London. They weren't going to have enough money to send him to full university, so he went and worked at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in London before becoming a columnist at the London Globe.

He wrote at least 96 books, wrote or collaborated on 16 plays, composed at least some of the lyrics, and were the book for 28 musicals, according to the new criterion. And his first book was in 1903. So then he starts traveling to America regularly by 1909. meets Ethel Newton and gets married, and she is credited with managing a lot of his business affairs. And then he starts earning lots of cash by the 1920s. He's doing Hollywood rewrite work.

And tax troubles begin in the 1930s. I read a nice long piece called The Genius of Woodhouse by Roger Kimball in the new criterion from like... I guess it was from 2000 or something like that. He referred to it as perhaps revealing his own political... believes kimball referred to it as something like the irs never found a big pile of money it couldn't go after something like that uh and so woodhouse heads off to europe

in france but wouldn't you know world war ii was happening so yeah that put a put a damper on a bunch of people's plans i feel like so he does that was a bad one get captured or, you know, taken in Berlin or he's taken to Berlin after being captured in France where he made, he was then released. I think he was in his 60s at this point, right? And he makes a series of radio broadcasts that kind of make light of being captured a bit. What do you mean that they make light?

of being captured so he was in various german camps for about a year released in 1941 allowed to go to berlin uh it was there he recorded the five radio talks that were broadcast to american england And, you know, quotes like young men starting out in life have often asked me, how can I become an internee? Well, there are several methods.

My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there until the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest. So just kind of making little funny jokes about it. Just making jokes about himself. And people did not appreciate this. They were not amused. Made a lot of people upset. You know. basically accusing him of getting rich off of uh you know maybe betraying his country a little bit

How did he betray his country by making little jokes? Well, because he did it for like the Germans led him. There was like perceptions that he was doing it to downplay the severity of the of the situation. And that the Germans were maybe putting him up to it or making a condition of release, which he says was not true. But British writers did not care for this. The British literati did not care for this.

And he became a bit of a persona non grata and had to run away to America where he spent the rest of his life. Okay. So I don't know. I haven't gone and listened to all of these podcasts that he made while he was in Germany. But it made people upset. As I said to you the other day, it made A.A. Milne upset. And if you're going to make the Winnie the Pooh guy upset, clearly you've done something. You better be ready to run, I guess. But...

Jeeves is one of his most famous creations named after a cricketer, Percy Jeeves, that he once saw play cricket. And then who has cricketers do. I think the first Jeeves appearance is in 1915 in a story called Extricating Young Gussie. But there was a prior story in 1914 featuring a valet named Jevons or Jevons. Were you saying valet? I thought it was valet. The British say valet. Huh. Yep.

British people can be wrong, you know. I don't know if you've heard this. This is what they say on Downton Abbey. I don't know what to tell you. It's a valet. You can say valet. I think they're both right. No, we can say valet. That's fine. They're probably both right. I can just think of at least one time when the Brits were really wrong about something. In 1953, in a book, Woodhouse said it was...

that Jeeves was inspired by an actual butler that he had. But I think there's some scholarship that's like, yeah, he didn't have that butler until the 20s. So it wasn't that good. I mean, maybe Jeeves over time became inspired by that guy Eugene or whatever his name was. He was also inspired by a story where Butler was traded in a poker game to an American.

and he thought that that would that the story did not handle the indignity that that man must have suffered well enough and he also was inspired by the like dynamic of sherlock and watson kind of this like you know very heady problem solver guy and your narrator who can't really solve anything without the help of the other person there are multiple Television and film and radio, it's British, so there's a lot of radio adaptations. There was the Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie TV versions.

a film of Thank You Jeeves in 1936. Andrew Lloyd Webber made a Jeeves musical called Jeeves in 1975. Please tell me that it had an exclamation point at the end of Jeeves. It didn't. Oh, man. But nobody liked it. It feels like it belongs there. And then 15 years later, they came back to it. rewrote it and called it by jeeves not goodbye but by jeeves like i guess like by gosh like by jove yes um so yeah that's there's a lot of jeeves out there it's

Mostly a lot of short stories. There are Jeeves novels. Several Jeeves novels. Like a lot of them. But this collection was published in 1919. A lot of the stories originally... uh appeared in the strand magazine in uk or the saturday evening post in the us and i think as you said andrew there are four Jeeves and Birdie stories in this collection and four Reggie Pepper stories. Reggie Pepper is... Reggie Pepper is something. Okay. Just like, what if we had...

Kind of a genial idiot who never needed to work a day in his life like Bertie Worcester, but he didn't have a cool butler who was trailing him around all the time. And then did you want to talk about Ask Jeeves at all, Andrew?

I mean, we can. I didn't bring anything. I didn't prepare anything. Okay. It's a search engine. I do know that toward the end of its life, there's not a functioning search engine anymore. You can go to ask.com. Yeah. mostly is pulling from a different search yeah yeah like it's not it's not its own thing the way it used to be but yeah they did get rid of jeeve they did kill jeeves at some point in the 2000s

Because the branding used to be a butler standing there with a plate to give you all the internet search results. They called it, this is coming from a Mental Floss article I found, but Garrett Gruner was the guy who started Ask Jeeves. He liked the idea of there being a virtual concierge, but he didn't think that enough people would know what concierge meant. So he found a butler name and called it Jeeves.

There was a non-disclosed settlement between Ask Jeeves and the Woodhouse estate in the year 2000. Because maybe... That's why he picked Jeeves. Who knows? And the thing I found really interesting is that the way it worked is that they had these pre-made knowledge capsules.

capsules they called them or whatever that were like if you typed in a question as you were meant to do it would just give you an answer if it had one before it gave you search uh-huh which is basically what they're breaking search now to create yeah except they spent time like actually writing these things yeah like that was always the the weakness of it is is you know the limited number of canned answers to like specific

questions but but for many many years tech companies have been like what if instead of having to put in weird like broken little queries that are optimized to get you the answers that you want because that's how Google has trained you to work. What if you could ask natural language questions to a search thing and have it...

bring you something that, that you wanted the problem. I mean, I think the problem with that now is that is actually that people have been trained to do it the other way for 30 years. So going into. A text field or speaking to my phone or computer and like asking it a question like I would ask a person a question feels.

ridiculous it makes me feel 100 years old because i've been taught my entire life that that's not how you get useful information out of the computer yeah no i don't think you're wrong there uh i'm not saying that's true for everybody but i think there there are multiple internet generations that were that were trained up doing it one way and now you're trying to go back the other way but and if you're wondering if you should launch a source engine of your own and have it you know

be a publicly traded stock uh when it launched in 1997 it was 14 it made it up to 190 at its peak and then in 2000 as quickly as 2002 it was down to 80 cents so yeah Don't launch a search engine named after a butler, I guess is the lesson. Yeah, because in the early days of the internet, it was all humans curating these directories of pages. And then starting in the mid-90s and into the late 90s, you start seeing the rise of these algorithm...

These automated web crawlers that use an algorithm to crawl through all web pages that exist and start putting up stuff that way.

And yeah, there are a lot of people, there are a lot of companies experimenting in that realm, but Google became so dominant so quickly that like Ask Jeeves and all these other, like AltaVista and all these other sites kind of... crashed and burned like ghosts yeah it's like these days it's like google is is huge bing has a little bit of it i i imagine at this point that like open ai or whoever is driving some amount of

Of traffic and everything else is nothing. Yep. So you can't ask Jeeves anymore. But Andrew, I'm going to ask. He's dead. He died in 2006. Somebody claimed that he was the first internet brand mascot to be in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I would love if somebody can quantify that for me, but it's a claim that's out there.

Didn't get Clippy in the parade before Jeeves? It's not like an internet company, though. Clippy, he lives on your computer. He doesn't need to be networked. Anyway, Andrew, I'm going to ask you. to come back after the break and tell me more about Jeeves.

It's modern times and you and I do not have a butler or any other kind of attendant. Nope. Who brings us things when we ask and keep us from wearing weird ties or like do anything. for us we do not have this we have to turn to the internet to do all this stuff yeah and that's why it's useful that this week's podcast is brought to you by Squarespace because they're the website that helps you make websites

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mean well all right then my lord tell me where you'd like to go first Here in this discussion of Jeeves. Not really how Jeeves talks. He says sir a lot. He says sir. He says sir a lot. These are two Englishmen who are living in New York City. Oh, okay. And it is... Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. Okay. Great.

And Bertie Worcester is the narrator of all of the Jeeves stories. And he talks about how smart Jeeves is and how he would be lost without Jeeves, but also is kind of a little baby child. Sure. Yeah, he's independently wealthy for reasons that he doesn't really get into.

He doesn't need to work. All he does is socialize and make friends with weirdos and be waited upon by his by his butler Jeeves. And each of the Jeeves stories and the Reggie Pepper stories are mostly like this, too, just without the Jeeves character. involves him getting stuck in some harebrained scheme. Sometimes Jeeves is involved in getting him into it and sometimes not. And then...

Jeeves usually devises some ingenious method to get him out of it. Okay. But their relationship is strange. Like, Jeeves... When Birdie tries to put on like a tie or like try a mustache that Jeeves doesn't like, Jeeves just gets kind of sulky about it. And Birdie is like, I could just tell. It's not that Jeeves says anything or does anything. I can just tell that Jeeves is upset at me. But I can't let this domineering butler rule my whole life.

I'm going to wear a pink tie because I want to wear a pink tie. But then at the end of the story, usually when Jeeves helps Bertie get out of whatever scrape that he's in, Bertie is like, hey, I'll shave the mustache. I'll get rid of the tie that you don't like. And Jeeves is like, awesome. Thank you, sir. And then that's the end of the story. That's how a lot of them end. I did see some allusions to this being a way in which some of the stories are constructed.

Is that if only Jeeves were around, the problems would be resolved quickly. But he's specifically not around because Birdie is wearing something stupid. And Jeeves has taken umbrage and gone off to do whatever. And usually Jeeves is like when he is solving these problems for Birdie, he's doing it quietly in the background so that. Burry doesn't even know what's happening until it's happened already. Great. So wonderful.

But yeah, I mean, so there are eight stories in this. Like I said, half of them are Bertie and Jeeves stories. The other half are Reggie Pepper stories. Reggie Pepper is a great off-brand name of something. It's a good name. And but and the voice is pretty but but you can see how he's sort of a precursor to the Bertie Worcester character. Sure. There is a story where he does have a butler but it's his name isn't Jeeves and the butler gets like fired at the end.

He is not as unswervingly loyal to Reggie Pepper as Jeeves is to Bertie Worcester. But you can see sort of the nascent... uh seeds of the dynamic that would become birdie and jeeves okay in that but yeah so the the one i will talk i want i'll probably talk about in the greatest detail

is the first one because it just establishes the pattern that basically all these stories kind of follow. Great. What is this story called? This is called Leave It to Jeeves. Okay. It was revised as The Artistic Career of Corky. when it got moved into carry-on Jeeves. I don't know. That's a worse name. Don't call it that. It's a much worse name. A considerably worse name.

Here's how the story opens. Please, my man, you know, is really a most extraordinary chap. And I wish I had like a good sort of... English, like a good one. Neither of us have a good one for some reason. Because all of this is so English. Like so much of the language is just the most exaggerated.

uh, old boy English accent that you could possibly imagine. Uh... jeeves my man you know is really a most extraordinary chap so capable honestly i shouldn't know what to do without him on broader lines he's like those chappies who sit peering sadly over the marble battlements at the pennsylvania station in the place marked inquiries you know the johnny's i mean you

Go up to them and say, when's the next train for Melon Squashville, Tennessee? And they reply without stopping to think. 243, track 10, change at San Francisco. And they're right every time. Well, Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience.

melon squashville tennessee yeah that's the name that he came up with for a town in tennessee i don't know if that's offensive i think it it is but like and i get the sense from that clip too that it is like Yes, there are maybe one liners, but often it from what I was reading, it's like in the aggregate, these passages are funny.

Yeah. He's just packing stuff in. Yeah. Yeah. And then you just get weird lines where it does make you wish that people still talk this way. I mean, maybe they do in England. Again, I don't know everything about the English. Clearly. But he says something, quote, had the aspect of being the real red hot Tabasco. Yeah. Just as a way to say that something is the genuine article. That's the real red hot Tabasco.

Yes. So he has an omniscient man. He's kind of an omniscient man who works for him and is so, so loyal to him for reasons that it's not really. 100% clear, except that Jeeves is just the perfect man, and that's just how he is. I don't think it's in this story. I think it's in a later one, but an anecdote is shared where someone tries to pay Jeeves twice as much money as Bertie pays him.

To go off and work for him instead. And Jeeves doesn't take it. Such as Jeeves' devotion to Birdie Worcester. Sure. Okay. So in this first story, there's a friend of Birdie's named Corky.

who seems like another kind of fail son, kind of, kind of guy who fancies himself an artist. And he, he, He likes to think of himself as somebody who draws portraits, but Birdie's like, you know, the trouble with trying to get known and make money in doing portraits is you have to make a lot of portraits to get good.

at doing it and to become like a requested portrait artist. But, but also the only way to do a bunch of portraits is to get people to ask you to do them. And so you get kind of stuck in a, in a, in a loop. where nothing is really happening for you. Sure. And Corky has got like an uncle or some kind of relative who is providing an allowance for him. This is a common thread is you've got some relative who's giving you enough money to live on.

And you do something that causes them to cut you off. And then the scheme needs to be like, how do we get you back in their good graces so that you can start mooching money off of them again? Yes, this is good. This is a good relatable problem. So Corky's thing is that he is taken up with some woman who is like a performer. She's kind of not somebody who...

the Corky's relative would approve of. And so Corky is telling Bertie Worcester about this and Jeeves kind of quietly clears his throat as he is want to do. And it's like, well, what you need to do is, you know, that your, your, your uncle. or whatever it is, really likes birds. And he wrote a book about how cool birds are. So what if you had her write her own book about birds?

And Jeeves and Birdie come up with this thing where Corky's uncle needs to meet this woman independently somehow, develop a good opinion of her. And then that will make it fine that Corky and this woman want to get married and be together. I love this. You can see where things are going to get kind of hairy here. It's too complicated. It's too contrived. Too many plates are spinning. Yeah.

So they do this. They have somebody basically ghost write a book about birds for this woman. And she sends a copy to Corky's uncle with a thing about how much she admires him and how much she wants to meet him. And then they meet. And then Bertie is out of town for a while. He just leaves to go like do something else for a bit somewhere. And then he comes back into town and he finds out that Corky's uncle has married this woman.

instead because they met each other and it actually worked too well and his uncle fell in love with her and they got married but is but is the uncle now in such a good mood that he's gonna like put the The kid back on the largesse? No, it's not even. It's not even. It goes even further than that. Uh-oh. So, okay. He and this woman have a child together. Wait, what? And they hire Corky to paint a portrait of... Because Corky's very sad about how all this has worked out.

And they hire Corky to paint a portrait of her and this baby. And he does it. And then the uncle comes and he looks at the painting and Corky is so mad and so jealous that apparently he's just painted a really horrible, ugly baby. Yeah. He's made the baby look really awful in this, in this painting because he's so jealous of the.

the baby in this whole situation and so it looks like it looks like all is all is ruined like uh corky's uncle's really mad at him he doesn't want the portrait he's not gonna pay him for the portrait and also corky is not like he's not using this portrait as a way to climb the ranks of portrait painters and get more work. But Jeeves comes and he looks at this painting with the ugly baby in it. And he's like, you know what you need to do is...

You need to send this ugly baby to the newspaper. And you need to pitch it as a comic series and have the newspaper buy it. And because this baby is so ugly and funny that it could be the basis for a successful comic strip. Okay. Manjeev says, if I might make the suggestion, Mr. Corcoran, for a title of the series, which you have in mind, The Adventures of Baby...

Okay. And so he does it. He makes the adventures of baby blobs. He makes a... comic strip about this ugly baby and his fortunes are saved and he is bringing in a steady income and it's all because it's all because of Jeeves Jeeves's idea the first one was was ended up being bad but then Jeeves had another idea

that brought it all back together. And it's sometimes you're not sure if Jeeves himself is like just barely smarter than Bertie Worcester is, or if this was Jeeves' grand plan for us all along, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So these are sitcoms. So these are like sitcom plots. It's all very sitcom. I love it. I love it. It relies on a lot of miscommunication and absurd circumstances.

and like weird characters showing up and throwing a wrench into things yes okay very i mean very much stuff of the stage he was a playwright you know very like comedy of manners kind of stuff okay so that's the first one That's leave it to Jeeves. And so all of these stories kind of turn on a similar sort of like scheme gone wrong. The thing goes right again by the end. Okay.

Uh, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest is, uh, there's a friend of Bertie's aunt, I think. And his aunt is mentioned, like, kind of hovers in the background of this. as an imposing, horrifying figure who Bertie does not want to run afoul of. Uh, and yeah, the, uh, Aunt Agatha is this woman's name. Okay. Aunt Agatha sent, sent this. woman to Bertie Wooster to help with a problem that she was having.

And Bertie says, I was glad to hear this as it showed that Aunt Agatha was beginning to come around a bit. There had been some unpleasantness a year before when she had sent me over to New York to disentangle my cousin Gussie from the clutches of a girl on the music hall stage. When I tell you that by the time I had finished my.

operations gussie had not only married the girl but had gone on the stage himself and was doing well you'll understand that aunt agatha was upset to no small extent i simply hadn't dared to go back and face her and it was a relief to find that time had healed the wound and all that sort of thing enough

to make her tell her pals to look me up what I mean is much as I liked America I didn't want to have England barred to me for the rest of my natural and believe me England is a jolly sight too small for anyone to live in with Aunt Agatha if she's really on the warpath oh wow So this friend of Ann Agatha's has come to call on Bertie Worcester and has brought her horrible son, Mottie. Okay, what's his problem?

And she says, I need to go write a book that's like an insider's view of America, just like this one I did about India. It's going to take me about a month. To do all my research, can you hang out with my horrible son, Maddie? How old is Maddie? Maddie's in his 20s or something. It's not like a silly baby. He's an adult. This is not Baby's Day Out. No, it's not Baby's Day Out. He's an adult fail son kind of guy. And so after...

After this friend of Agatha's leaves, Mahdi just goes wild. He's out every night. He's carousing. He's doing all this stuff because he's under the thumb of his mother, usually. And he says, I have to basically, I have to fit like a decade's worth of carousing into these four weeks. Oh, he's on Rumspringer. Okay. Yeah, a little bit. So Mahdi is doing all kinds of.

kinds of nutso stuff uh he he has a dog that he like brings into the house and like ties around the leg of a table who like attacks birdie And Bertie leaves for a little bit. He just needs to get out of there to stay with a friend because Mahdi is driving him up a wall. And then when he comes back... He finds that Mahdi has been thrown into prison for carousing too hard. Sure. Book him. And he's like, this is great.

This this this is awesome for me. Maybe being in jail for a while is just what this kid needs. Oh, no. And. Has Jeeves shown up at all in this process? Jeeves is around. Yeah, Jeeves is around. We'll talk a little bit more about Jeeves' part in this story. Jeeves is here. Mahdi's in jail. Okay. Lady Malvern is the name of the friend of Aunt Agatha's, whose son Mahdi is. Great. And so Jeeves...

Lady Malvern shows up a little ahead of schedule. Oh. And Jeeves suggests to Birdie, well, why don't you tell her that... Mahdi is visiting Boston and he's doing it because he wanted to get like a good, you know, he wanted to collect more notes for your book about America. And so he's gone somewhere else. And that's why he's not at the house.

So Bertie does this and Lady Malvern is like, well, if he's in Boston, then why did I go to visit a prison to get an idea of prison conditions in America? And I saw my son there in prison. uh-oh, the carceral state played you again, birdie. And then Jeeves clears his throat and is like, well, this is all a misunderstanding. Mahdi did go to prison to learn more about what being in prison is like for your book about America. What a good lie. Lady Malvern buys it.

and birdie they they were having some fight about i think this is the one where they were having the fight about like the pink tie or a hat or something that birdie liked that jeeves hated and birdie is so thrilled that he tells jeeves he can get rid of the tie he doesn't like and then jeeves says something interesting he says i need to give We need to see Imadi so I can give him some money because he and I were out and I bet him $50.

that while I was trying to convince him not to, not to party so hard, I bet him $50 that he wouldn't punch a cop in the face. And then he did punch a cop in the face and that's why he was in prison. So basically Jeeves did accidentally get body. Set to prison. Jeeves! I bet you won't punch a cop. Jeeves. Yeah. Hmm. Okay.

That's how that one ends? Yeah, that's how that one ends. Okay, great. Next story is Jeeves and the hard-boiled egg. Delicious. I think this is the one where it's... Birdie's friend, Bicky. Birdie and Bicky. He's being cut off by a rich relative. birdie needs to like help him get the money back okay sure and the scheme like the scheme that that jeeves helps them come up with is like

Rubes in America will pay money to shake a man's hand if they think that he's nobility from some other country. That's a good grift. Sure. So Bicky's relative is... Yeah, Bicky's uncle is the Duke of Chiswick. And they come up with a scheme where... People from out of town are going to pay money to come and shake the Duke of Chiswick's hand. Okay. If you say so. Yeah.

And this is all like Bicky's trying to get a job or like show some stable source of income so that the Duke will keep giving him an allowance. But then he shows up and they pretend that like Birdie's flat is Bicky's flat. And the Duke is like, well, obviously you're doing so well. You've got this nice flat. You've got this Butler Jeeves. Like, I don't need to be paying you money at all. And so it goes on too far. And Biggie keeps repeatedly bringing up this idea.

Where if he just had a little bit of capital, he could buy one chicken. And it costs nothing to raise chickens, he keeps saying. And so you could have the chickens lay eggs and that would basically be just pure profit. And you could just buy as many chickens as you want. And the more chickens you had, the more profit that you would get. Bertie has stupid friends.

Like, as silly as Bertie is, his friends are usually more stupid. What I'm getting, though, is it's like how well Woodhouse has set up the like, well, there's always a friend coming through. There's always an aunt with a... with an acquaintance and we're in america so we can like kind of construct these people don't know us or we can play off the yeah the differences in societies a little bit too yeah yeah Okay.

And so they do this like farcical thing where like Jeeves meets a bunch of guys from Missouri and at the theater and they all collectively say, okay, we'll pay you $150 to come shake the Duke of Chiswick's hand. And the Duke of Chiswick finds out about.

this plan he's like I'm not shaking all these guys hands send them home and then Jeeves' next plan is as in the first story is to get the newspaper involved he's like he said he says to birdie why don't you call a newspaper and tell them this whole story because won't it be fun they'll probably buy it because it's so funny and this one the duke of chiswick doesn't want

the story to get out and so he offers birdie or he offers bicky a like job that pays a lot of money in his okay whatever business it is that he owns so blackmail yeah and then jeeves Jeeves. So Jeeves saves the day again. Great. Thank you, Jeeves. How much Reggie Pepper do you want to tell us about, Andrew?

All the Reggie Pepper stories kind of bleed together for me a little bit. The funniest Reggie Pepper story is probably the first one. Well, okay, okay. I mean, there's some good Reggie Pepper stories. There's one Reggie Pepper story where... There's this guy and he's married to this woman and the guy cannot remember. Like he doesn't remember their anniversary and he doesn't remember like her birthday. And she gets really mad at him and moves out and leaves a note that's like.

I will move back with you when you can call me and tell me what my birthday is. Okay. And so Reggie Pepper and this guy. do a bunch of sleuthing to like figure out okay what'd you do for the last time she had a birthday and they narrow it down to like he took her to a theater and they were doing this like specific show and it was a matinee and

You know, can you look in your checkbook and find the exact date of whatever, whatever. And so they do that. And she and then Reggie Pepper calls Mary, this woman, and it turns out that they were in cahoots all along. but Reggie pepper says to Mary, Oh, he, you know, he worked so hard. He did this and this and this. And Mary is like, what kind of friend are you that you wouldn't just tell him when my, when my birthday was and actually gets mad at him. for how hard his friend had to work.

Why were they in cahoots, though? I don't know why they were in cahoots. It's a surprise twist at the end. when reggie pepper calls her at the hotel she's staying in and like gives her an update and mary is so upset about what a bad friend he is. And the end of this story is just that, yeah, this guy's still kind of friendly with Reggie Pepper at the club, but he doesn't get invited to come over to their house anymore because they both...

are kind of mad at him and don't like him anymore. Great. Uh, the other Reggie pepper story that I think is funny enough to talk about a little bit is, uh, helping Freddy. This was rewritten as a Jeeves story called Fixing It for Freddy. I did not read the Jeeves version. I only read the Reggie Pepper story. Basically, Reggie Pepper has some other dumb aristocrat friend.

Yeah. And he's in love with this woman and he sees her. Reggie Pepper sees this woman playing with a big fat baby on the beach. And is like, and Reggie Pepper gets it into his head. See, this is the Jeeves character isn't around to like invent stuff to do. So Reggie Pepper just kind of invents dumb stuff to do himself. Okay.

Reggie Pepper says, what I'm going to do is I'm going to kidnap this child and I'm going to bring it to my friend and he's going to bring it to this woman. And she'll be so overjoyed that her charge has been returned to her that. that she will fall in love with him. A classic Jape. Yeah, a classic Jape. And he does this and it turns out that the kid was just some random kid that she met on the beach and she has no attachment to him at all. And then Reggie Pepper needs to like find his parents.

so that he doesn't get thrown in jail for kidnapping this kid he does find the parents eventually and the parents say well great all of us have the mumps and we don't we can't have our our fat baby in here with us because we don't want him to get the mumps And you are the nephew of somebody who we know the reputation of. So I can't think of anybody better to take care of this fat baby for us for a few days. Thank you so much.

And so now Reggie Pepper just has this baby to take care of. Okay, so now we have a baby story. This is good. Now we have a baby story. And then another friend comes over and is like, what you need to do is you need to put on a play. with this baby where, where the baby says to the, the woman needs to kiss, needs to kiss Freddie, the friend who's like trying to get with this lady.

And you do it that way. Uh-huh. And it's so contrived. And they keep giving this kid candy to get it to say, kiss Freddy, kiss Freddy. Because that's the line that this kid is going to have that makes this whole thing come together. Okay. And then she comes by just like by accident and sees this kid and recognizes the kid because.

You know, she met him on the beach and then gives him candy. And then the baby says, kiss Freddy, kiss Freddy. And everybody's like, oh, this isn't going down exactly like we planned. This is our whole farce is going to be exposed and it's going to be a big disaster. But it turns out that she is so touched by all of this that she does kiss Freddie, and they all get together, and that's the end of the story. It's a happy ending. Oh, boy.

I can't tell you how tickled I am by no, please don't return our child to us. We have the mumps. We all have the mumps. You have to go take care of our baby. Very silly. Very silly. Was there one more Jeeves story that we didn't talk about? There's another Jeeves. So yeah, the book ends with a, with the last Jeeves story. There are two more Reggie Pepper stories that I don't, they were like fine. There's one where a guy has to pretend to be his own.

twin brother because he was accused of like beating up some royalty. Cause they, cause he and Reggie Pepper and a couple people are going to like meet an uncle who's been like keeping money.

in a conservatorship or something until this guy turned 25 and so they're going to get it but then it turns out that this guy gambled all the money the uncle gambled all the money away and he doesn't have the money but then okay this is good what here's how i know this was a fun read is because i was like all right what which stories do you need to yada yada and you can't help but like uncork it and all the little the snakes just start popping out of the can yeah

Yeah. I'm sure I'm not telling each of them because they all have all this like... contrived like multi-camera sitcom yeah that's the point it's like yeah we're in if you take like any given episode of like friends or seinfeld or something and you're trying to unpack it inside of three minutes it's gonna sound like

It's going to sound basically like this. Yeah. And like the Simpsons is an interesting touch point to think about, too, because a lot of the commentary I read on Woodhouse is like, yeah, this is always set in this like kind of vague 20s ish. roaring 20s time these characters don't age it's just he's he can just go back to the jeeves well whenever he has a cool idea yeah right yeah okay uh but yeah he's so he

And like unrelated, this guy, George, like he got really drunk and he lost his hat and he doesn't remember what happened to him the night before. But this prince like was beat up in town. And so and, you know, there's an inspector there and he has proof and everybody's like, well, he has your hat and you did it. And so you need to pretend to be your own twin brother.

And then because he just found out that he had a twin brother because his uncle had told him about it in a letter. And then it turns out that the twin brother was a lie. It was a thing that he was trying to that his uncle was trying to come up with to explain why he didn't have the inheritance money anymore. Oh, my goodness. And then it turns out that the prince wakes up and is like, well, actually, George saved me from.

the assailant in the alley and I'm trying to find him. And then George says, well, I'm not my twin brother after all. I'm just me. Can I have the reward now? And he does get the reward and everything works out.

Of course it does. It is interesting that it's more of a... You end this mostly on it basically works out for everybody and not people miss out on... like windfalls or other opportunities because there was so much chicanery and like contrived circumstance that sprung up around it does always seem to circle back to what is a silly way for this to all be okay yeah yeah okay

The last Jeeves story, the last story in the collection is called The Ant and the Sluggard. Whoa. And Birdie's got another friend. His name's Rocky. And Rocky is a poet. who publishes roughly one poem a month and then sleeps the rest of the time. And Rocky has an aunt who really loves New York City.

But says because of her health that she cannot come experience New York City for herself. So she's giving Rocky money. And to continue getting the money, Rocky needs to go to New York City and experience the nightlife. and write her very detailed letters about all the fun times he's having and all the fun stuff that he's doing.

What an amazing premise. What a good premise. And Jeeves is like, well, you don't have to do it, but I can go out and I can party and have a good time and I can write you the letters and then you can kind of punch them up and then send them to your aunt. And they do this and it works for a little while. But then his aunt shows up at Bertie's house. The letters were too good. It made it sound like New York was too fun of a party.

And she thinks that Birdie's house is Rocky's house. And so and the Jeeves is Rocky's butler. And so Birdie gets kicked out. And has to go stay at a hotel, and he acts as though he's been thrown into prison. Well, yeah. Birdie is having a miserable time.

through all of this and also now rocky actually does need to be in new york and he's miserable also because he does need to be going to all these good and also it's clear that he is not the life of the party at every one of these gatherings that he goes to as his letters had been has been, had been saying. And so he's like, well, it's only a matter of time until the, until the jig is up. And the solution that Jeeves contrives for this is to add to quote unquote, accidentally set it up.

So that Rocky's aunt goes to Madison Square Garden to a to like a show or a sermon from some guy who just wants to talk about how New York is like a den of. Oh, God. Nobody should be doing any of the nightlife because it's all immoral and awful and horrible. And then the aunt is like, man, Rocky, you need to get away from New York. I'll keep paying you the money, but you can't be in this terrible place anymore. And I don't want to be in this terrible place anymore either.

The aunt leaves. Rocky doesn't need to live in New York anymore, and he's still getting the money, and Bertie gets his house back and his butler back. Good job, Jeeves. And then, again, the story closes on Birdie being like, yeah, that article of clothing that you hated, Jeeves, you can get rid of it now. You know that everybody in 1916 is like, he said the thing. He said get rid of the clothes. They're going to the thrift store. So do you like Jeeves as a guy?

How do you feel about... I think I've gleaned how you feel about Bertie Worcester, but... Bertie Worcester is kind of a fun idiot, and he is Watson-esque if Sherlock Holmes. was more like farcical yes yeah uh-huh because you like Jeeves is like the main character of the story but you only really see him through this like through a remove and through the eyes of somebody who thinks he can do no wrong

Yeah, I think in later books, I only read some summaries of how the relationship develops. My understanding is that the Jeeves and Birdie stuff, like...

it starts as short stories and it becomes novels eventually. And they are like, they're not peers exactly because Bertie Worcester is Jeeves's employer, but it is clearer that they're like, friends and that there is some kind of like mutual respect between them yeah but yeah like mostly what i'm here for is like oh this is where this is where sitcoms

came from this yes this is not that it's where they came from but this is like this is an extremely identifiable pattern that comes you know years before uh even like i love lucy let alone like any of the like uh, sixties, the other like sixties, seventies sitcoms that you think of is really like perfecting this weird, like, uh, horny farcical.

I mean, I know you're also talking about, like, you're talking about Shakespeare, you're talking about all kinds of other theater that is playing in this arena. But yeah, these beats... are super recognizable as a, as like a sitcom structure where everything starts at a status quo. Things, things happen. There are hilarious contrivances.

and misunderstandings and then by the end you get to like a mostly happy ending that restores the status quo and then you move on to the next story next time yeah that sounds great why would i so i had a fun time with it like i'm not i'm not I'm not analyzing it super closely. I'm not thinking about it too hard. But I did enjoy these. And they tickled a similar part of my brain as Skeleton did in the...

That's going to be the high watermark for you for a while. Yeah, I mean, I just like Skeleton so much. But there's just so much goofy stuff happening in these. Yeah. And it's... So fun to like reconstruct them and tell another person about them in podcast format that I am inclined to think warmly of them. On the like surface silliness of Woodhouse, I have two quotes to share.

Um... that seem relevant here there one in his preface to summer lightning he talks about a critic who had quote made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained all the old woodhouse characters under different names And Woodhouse owned the charge and wrote...

This critic has probably by now been eaten by bears like the children who made mock of the prophet Elijah. But if he still survives, he will not be able to make a similar charge against this book. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generaled this man. this time by putting in all the old Woodhouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel I rather fancy. And then in an oft-quoted letter...

to his friend William Townend. He said, I believe there are only two ways of writing a novel. One is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether. The other is going down deep into life and not carrying a dam. And so he knows that there are people who write important books, and he is here to tell you that's fine for them.

I will sell my stories that make people laugh. And the fact that they are kind of cordoned off from a world of consequence. Yeah.

Jail's a feature, of course. Jail's a feature, but it's like, you know, it's like a temporary, it's like white man jail. Yes. Where you get thrown in there to cool your heels and then you get released and there's not like a... you know any kind of complex that's built to like keep you in that system or to like repeatedly punish you for having interacted with that system no you just get to go ask your aunt for more money and she gives it to you yeah

So thanks for reading about Jeeves, Andrew. You're welcome. Thank you for letting me ask you about him. Yeah, I'm glad that you could ask me and that I could deliver an answer to your...

Plain language queries in a way that you found satisfying. I did find them satisfying. If you, the listener at home, have any questions about Jeeves, you can send them to overdopod at gmail. Hit us up on social media at OverduePod. Thanks to Brenda, Robert, and Elizabeth. Many more for reaching out in the past week. Our theme song is composed by Nick Larangis.

Andrew, if folks want to know more about the show, where do they go? Overduepodcast.com is the internet website. We have the schedule of the books that we have read and are going to read. I'll let Craig read you the November schedule here in just a second. Patreon.com slash OverduePod is the other link to know about. We publish our monthly newsletter, Dusty Bookshelves. We publish, what else? Bonus episodes, including Long Read.

episodes. We are coming in on the end of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion and our ongoing series The Silly Marillion. Uh, we also have a discord community and, uh, ad free episodes and all kinds of other stuff up there. So patreon.com slash overdue pod, support the show directly. You get a little bit of stuff.

We get to keep making the show the way we want to make it and the way that most of you seem to be enjoying. So, yeah, everybody wins. We only make it the way you want it, okay? Yeah. Stop complaining, everyone. What are we doing in November? Well, Andrew just read My Man Jeeves by P.G. Woodhouse. Next week we'll be talking about Belle Canto by Ann Patchett. Then I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Hartman. And closing out the month.

with An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. That's the schedule. All right, everybody. Jeeves, thank you for listening to our show. And until we talk to you next week, please try to be happy. That was a HeadGum podcast. Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8. Only at McDonald's. For limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California and for delivery.