Showing posts with label The Cult of PG Wodehouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Cult of PG Wodehouse. Show all posts

Thursday, 2 January 2020

Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin - A laugh riot by PG Wodehouse


Can a misfit be called a misfit in a more polite way?

In the West End of London – say at the Drones Club in Dover Street, of which he was a popular member- you would have encountered him without surprise. In the executive building of the Superba – Llewellyn, he seemed out of place. You felt he ought not to be there.

A latecomers guide to audacious cover-up

Sorry, I’m late.....Anything sensational happened in my absence?

`No’

`No earthquakes or other Acts of God?’

`No’

`No trouble brewing in the writers kraals? The natives not restless?

`No’

One liner to handle the surprises of life

In this world we must be prepared for anybody to say anything.

You too would love to be frustrated after reading this line

Sandy’s exasperation became too much for her. If she had had any more lethal weapon than a small notebook, she would have thrown it at him.

If a mere chronicler in these circumstances has a feeling of bafflement and frustration, as though he had raced to catch a train on Saturday morning and found on arrival at the station that it was Sunday.

Hen-pecked husbands, more invective words cannot describe us.

At her command he jumps through hoops and snaps lumps of sugar off his nose. He weeps with delight when she gives him a smile and trembles with fear at her frown.

Customs inspectors terrified him, but not nearly so much as she did, and he had good reason for his termors. In her professional days she had been one of the best known panther women on the silver screen, once a panther woman, always a panther woman. So he reached the conclusion that however unpleasant the alternative her wishes would have to be obeyed. But he didn’t like the prospect.


There is no better way to describe these cruel fathers of beautiful girls.

The emotions of a young lover who has planned to lunch with the girl he adores and gets her father instead are more readily imagined than described.






Is this Marital Trust or a Vouching Of The Husband’s timidness?

`Don’t be a damned fool’ said Grace `My husband wouldn’t have the nerve to cheat on me if you brought him all the girls in the Christmas number of Playboy asleep on a chair’

A Diet Detective?

`He’s on a diet’ said Grace `It was my daughter’s suggestion. And I’m going to see he sticks to it. No alcohol, no starchy foods. So search his room from time to time, and if you find he’s hiding cakes and candy and all that, tell me immediately and I’ll attend to it’.



That’s not the kindest way to describe an individual

Mr Molloy’s resemblance to an American senator of the better sort inspired in those he met, a confidence which was of the greatest help to him in life-work of selling stock in non-existent oil wells.

If only couples took inspiration from Mr and Mrs Molloy

Each respected the other’s Art, which is recognised as being the firmest foundation for a happy marriage. If Soapy Molloy made a killing, nobody could be more eager to celebrate than Dolly, and he was the first to applaud when she returned from an afternoon at the stores with objects that would come in useful about the home.


There is no better way to abash a rival

`Three heads are better than one, even if one of them’s Soapy’s’

`What’s wrong with my head?’ Soapy demanded with some heat.

`Solid Ivory’ said Chimp `And it doesn’t even look nice’


The golden rule for all married men


Married men don’t assert themselves, not if they know what’s good for them.

The golden rule for all men wanting to get married

Never marry anyone who makes conditions, and says she won’t on the dotted line unless you do something or other.

The golden rule for all women wanting to get married

I’ve had too many friend who’ve married Greek gods and spent the rest of their leisure time kicking themselves.






The hen possibly didn’t know in the future an Indian Actor will come who will make Monty look a saint

And Indeed Monty had given the wheel a dangerous twiddle, causing a meditative hen which had stepped into the road to take to itself the wings of the dove and disappear over the horizon.

If only all Bosses reposed such confidence in their subordinates

Fire you? I wouldn’t fire you if the President of the United States and his entire Cabinet fell on their knees and begged me to. If this son of a Butterwick thinks he can get to first base with me, he’s very much mistaken `Butterwick’ I shall say to him – after I’ve had my lunch, of course - `You’re a low hound, and you’ve as much chance of wheedling me into giving young Bodkin the pink slip as I have of getting my wife to let me eat a chocolate eclair. Drop dead, Butterwick” I shall say’





For some, being in command is important for some is as much important as it is for a fish to be in water

It added to her gratification that she would now be able to go home. She had found her visit pleasant enough, but she never enjoyed being a guest and having no say in the running of the establishment. It cramped her not to be in command.



Thats’ what they call made for each other, because only one of them, can and gets to do the thinking.

Dolly and Soapy were deep in thought, the former musing on her plan, the latter trying to make a guess of what that plan could be. It was to what virtually amounted to an assembly of waxworks that Grayce re-entered.


You shouldn’t cheat an individual so much!!!

`Talk sense, sweetie. Once seen, never forgotten, that map of yours, so dignified’ said Dolly with touch of wifey pride. `He could pick you out of any police line-up if the had catracts in both eyes’.

When you have led such a distinguished life that the long arms of law have always had you in its grasp


Only once in his life had Chimp experienced the thrill these words sent tingling through his weedy little body. That was when he had heard the foreman of the jury say `not guilty’ when he had been expecting to be shipped to Dartmoor for a five-year stay.

Some people are alive because it is a crime to murder themselves

Her only hope of avoiding conversation with him would have been to run over him in the car, a step which despite its obvious appeal she thought it would be unwise to take. She did not waiver in the view she had always held that there was no good Chimp but a dead Chimp, but she knew how fussy the police can be about these things.



When you are a hen-pecked husband, and you dare not to get kicked

A stronger man might have offered the suggestion that the thing for her to do was to get out of here and leave him to catch up with his sleep, but Mr Llewllyn, though resentful, was not quite capable of it.

`I don’t want any piece of it. Who does she think I am? One of those dauntless death-defying guys who go into cages at the circus and look murderous man-eating monarchs of the jungle in the eye and make them wilt? I wouldn’t have the nerve to talk to Grayce like that on long-distance telephone. No, sir, not if I was in Paris, France, and she was in Honolulu.’


You can either be a successful business man or an honest one, the choice is yours.

You can’t go by what a man in my position promises. You don’t really suppose, do you, that you can can run a big studio successfully if you go about keeping your promises all the time? If you want me to keep a promise, have me put it in writing and take it to a public notary and get it stamped. And even after that you’ll have my lawyers to deal with.



Tuesday, 2 May 2017

A Few Light Moments From `Heavy Weather' By PG Wodehouse

Can dim wittedness of an individual be better described than this?
                Minds like Monty Bodkin’s may not always work at express speed, but they are subject to the same subconscious process as those of more brain-burdened man.

The bizarre tastes of an individual perfectly explained.
From time to time he sniffed sensuously. Elsewhere throughout this fair domain the air was fragrant with the myriad scents of high summer, but not where Lord Emsworth was doing his sniffling. Within a liberal radius of the Empress’s headquarters other scents could not compete. This splendid animal diffused an aroma which was both distinctive and arresting. Attractive, too, if you liked that sort of thing, as Lord Emsworth did

Bad vibes cannot be told more humorously
He trembled. It would have pained the immaculate Monty, could he have known that his prospective employer was picturing him at this moment as a furtive, shifty-eyed, rat-like person of the gangster type, liable at the first opportunity to sneak into the sixes of innocent pigs and plant pineapple bombs in their bran-mash

You should know what to say when
Yes, that’s how I remember him. One of those fellows you can count on to say the wrong thing. Reminds me rather of a man I used to know in the old days called Bagshott. Boko Bagshott, we called him. Took a girl to supper once at the Garden. Supper scarcely concluded when angry old gentleman plunges into the room and starts shaking his fist in Boko’s face. Boko rises with chivalrous gesture `Have no fear, sir. I am a man of honour. I will marry your daughter’ `Daughter’ says old gentleman, foaming at little at the mouth `Damn it, that’s my wife’ Took all Boko’s tact to pass it off, I believe.


Saturday, 15 April 2017

A Few More Laughs From ` The Small Bachelor' by PG Wodehouse


I have already posted on `The Small Bachelor' , but the laughs in this novel is unlimited. Despite posting in two parts, a third part is fully loaded


http://balu036.blogspot.in/2017/04/my-favourite-book-of-p-g-wodehouse-is.html

http://balu036.blogspot.in/2017/04/time-and-distance-problems-made-fun-of.html

Here is the final instalment but this is just a tip of the iceberg of this funniest novel by PGW

This is the last place you should be proposing to a girl
                `Well, anyway, we walked around for a while, looking at the animals, suddenly he asked me to marry him outside the cage of the Siberian yak’
                `No, sir!’ exclaimed Sigsbee H, with a sudden strange firmness, the indulgent father who for once in his life asserts himself `When you get married, you’ll be married in St Thomas’s like any other nice girl’
                `I mean it was outside the cage of the Siberian yak that he asked me to marry him’
                Why do parents especially mothers of beautiful girls entertain such thoughts about their daughter’s lover?
                George was not vain, and if Molly’s stepmother had been simply content to look at him as if she thought he was something the cat had dragged out of the dustbin, he could have borne up. Her whole attitude betrayed her belief that the cat, on inspecting George, had been disappointed. Seeing what it had got, her manner suggested, it had given him the look of chagrin which cats give when conscious of effort wasted and gone elsewhere to try.
                What a definition of marriage!
                Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies the corpse.
                Can hatred towards an individual be expressed in a better way?
                What on earth was the use of trying to be optimistic about a world which contained people like Hamilton Beamish?
                Why else do they say Love is Blind, it can make the most logical of men go bizarre!!!
                Hamilton Beamish had been listening to these exchanges with a rapidly rising temperature. His heart was pounding feverishly in his bosom. There is no one who become so primitive, when gripped by love, as the man who all his life has dwelt in the cool empyrean of the intellect. For twenty years and more, Hamilton Beamish had supposed that he was above the crude passions of the ordinary man, and when love got him it got him good. And now, standing there and listening to these two, he was conscious of a jealousy so keen that he could no longer keep silent. Hamilton Beamish, the thinker, had ceased to be; and there stood in his place Hamilton Beamish, the descendant of ancestors who had conducted their love affairs with stout clubs and who, on seeing a rival, wasted no time in calm reflection but jumped on him like a ton of bricks and did their best to bit his head off. If you had given him a bearskin and taken away his spectacles, Hamilton Beamish at this moment would have been prehistoric man.
                An individual’s lack of intelligence cannot be said more funnily
                Sigsbee H Waddington, as has perhaps been sufficiently indicated in this narrative, was not a man who could think deeply without getting a headache; but even at the expense of an aching head he had been compelled to do some very deep thinking as he journeyed to New York in the train.

                The Thumb Rule to a Happy Married Life
                `I’m always right’ said Fanny, giving her husband’s cheek a loving pinch `That’s the first thing you’ve to get into your head, now you’re a married man’
                A philosophical thought on morality
                The instinct of self preservation not only sharpens the wits, but at the same time dulls the moral sensibility.
                 An insensitive person cannot be described better
                Deaf persons had always irritated her, for like so many women of an impatient and masterful turn of mind, she was of the opinion that they could hear perfectly well if they took the trouble.
                PGW has a way with explaining the fairer sex’s tyranny….
                She drew away. She was not normally an unkind girl, but the impulse of the female of the species to torture the man it loves is well known. Women maybe a ministering angel  when pain and anguish wring the brow; but, if at other times she sees a chance to prod the loved one and watch him squirm, she hates to miss it.
                … or expressing the superiority of the male.
                The girl eyed him worshipfully. One of the consolations which we men of intellect have is that, when things come to a crisis, what captures the female heart is brains. Women may permit themselves in times of peace to stray after sheiks and look languishingly at lizards whose only claim to admiration is that they cannot go the first three steps of the Charleston; but let matters go wrong; let some peril threaten; and who then is the main kingpin, who the main squeeze? The man with the Eight and a Quarter hat.

                A man cannot be more determined than this…
                A cyclone might shake this man, but not the human eye.
                

Thursday, 6 April 2017

Time And Distance Problems Made Fun Of By PG Wodehouse In `The Small Bachelor'

Here is PG Wodehouse making fun of time and distance problems  in The Small Bachelor


                `Ah, but you don’t understand’, said Mr. Waddington hastily `When I say that the necklace is in the strong-room, mean that it is there just now. Eventually it will be taken out and placed among the other wedding-presents’
                `This begins to look more like it’
                `I can mention no names, of course…’
                `I don’t expect you to’
                `Then I will simply say that A, to whom the necklace belongs, is shortly about to be married to B’
                `I might have known it. Doing all those bridge problems together, they kind of got fond one another’
                `I have my reasons for thinking that the wedding will take place down at Hempstead on Long Island, where C, A’s stepmother, has her summer house’
                `Why? Why not in New York?’
                `Because’, said Mr Waddington simply ` I expressed a wish that it should take place in New York’
                `What have you go to do with it?’
                `I am D, C’s husband’

                `Oh, the fellow who could fill a tank with water in six hours fifteen minutes while C was filling another in five hour forty-five? Pleased to meet you’

Me, Books, and an Audible Milestone

 I can confidently boast that I am more receptive to technology than most 50 year olds. Right from learning how to use the Internet, to writ...