Loading summary
Transcript343 lines
- [00:02]
A
This is a Headgun podcast.
- [00:06]
B
This episode is brought to you in part by Uncommon Goods. The countdown is on. Andrew, Tick tock. Holiday shopping season is officially here. Uncommon Goods takes the stress out of gifting with thousands of unique, high quality finds that you won't see anywhere else. Do not wait. The most meaningful gifts go faster and you're going to be too busy looking up how to spatchcock a turkey to do more shopping if you don't get to it soon. So Uncommon Good, that's what I did last year. I had to read a lot of stuff about turkey and I did. You know, I have ran out of time for gifts, so don't do that. Don't be like me. Uncommon Goods looks for products that are high quality, unique, and often handmade or made in the U.S. many are crafted by independent artists and small businesses, making every gift feel meaningful and truly one of a kind. Andrew, you recently bought some things on Uncommon Goods. I believe I did.
- [01:00]
A
Yeah. Yeah, bought it. Bought an anniversary gift one at one of the other gift giving occasions. That's not the holidays, but yeah. I bought a make your own limoncello kit because we went to Italy several, several years ago and had some very nice times sitting and sipping limoncello and just relaxing and not being parents yet.
- [01:21]
B
Yeah.
- [01:22]
A
And yeah, it seemed like a cool way to learn how to do a thing and then also like, you know, remember a nice thing that, that we did together once.
- [01:30]
B
That's a great idea for a gift. Good find, Andrew, and good work. Uncommon Goods, they have something for everyone. Moms, dads, kids and teens. You'll find thousands of new gift ideas that you won't find anywhere else. And when you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting artists and small independent businesses. And with every purchase you make at Uncommon Goods, they give back $1 to a nonprofit partner with of your choice. So don't wait. Cross those names off your list before the rush. To get 15% off your next gift, go to UncommonGoods.com overdue. That's UncommonGoods.com overdue for 15% off Uncommon Goods. We're all out of the ordinary, Andrew. If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no. At Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages. No hidden fees, no bs.
- [02:29]
A
Craig, did you know that you can get premium wireless from mint mobile for $15 a month? Did you know this? Did you hear about this?
- [02:36]
B
That sounds.
- [02:36]
A
Are you reading? You reading the same copy?
- [02:38]
B
I'm reading the same copy and it looks the same good to me.
- [02:43]
A
You can ditch overpriced wireless and their jaw dropping monthly bills, unexpected overages and hidden fees. Plans start at $15 a month at Mint. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Craig I've used Mint Mobile for years. I switched from one of the big boys. I have not missed the big boy for even one second. One thing I do like about Mint is they have a big range of plans at all different like price and data tiers. So it works for people like me who use a ton of data and also works for people who do not need a ton of data but do need reliable service and connectivity when they are using their phones. So yes, that's why I like Mint Mobile and that's why I think that you also will like them.
- [03:27]
B
That sounds good. And if it sounds good to you at home, you might be ready to say yes to saying no. So make the switch@mintmobile.com overdue that's mintmobile.com overdue upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month limited time. New customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
- [04:00]
A
While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any.
- [04:04]
B
Well told tale, they will not shy.
- [04:06]
A
Away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.
- [04:10]
B
Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Hey everybody. Welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.
- [04:44]
A
My name is Andrew.
- [04:46]
B
My man Jeeves. My man, my man Jeeves. I say my man, you say chiefs. All the. 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. What book did you read on this week's podcast?
- [05:19]
A
I did read My man Jeeves by P.G. wodehouse. Woodhouse.
- [05:23]
B
Woodhouse.
- [05:25]
A
We've gotten people very authoritatively saying that it's every possible permutation pronunciation.
- [05:31]
B
I watched so some videos of British people saying Woodhouse and British people can be wrong.
- [05:39]
A
Craig, I Don't know if you knew this about that.
- [05:40]
B
He's British. Fair enough.
- [05:42]
A
There was a. Listen, there was at least one time when they were wrong. Back in 1776.
- [05:46]
B
Oh, my goodness. And Emma. Emma saying on YouTube, Emma saying.
- [05:52]
A
Emma saying is full of it.
- [05:54]
B
She says Woodhouse.
- [05:55]
A
Emma is saying lies. So.
- [05:58]
B
Emma saying predates our current AI debacle. So I, I'm.
- [06:04]
A
But it's still like weird, like, text to speech stuff. It seems like it doesn't. I'm not. I don't trust it.
- [06:10]
B
I. I trust I've had.
- [06:12]
A
I've countermand m saying enough times that I don't. I don't take it as gospel if I can only find it on msa.
- [06:19]
B
I feel fine going with Woodhouse because Stephen Fry, who played Jeeves a bunch says Woodhouse.
- [06:26]
A
Yeah, okay. You know, that's. I, I can.
- [06:28]
B
Maybe I should have led with that rather than Emma saying, yeah, no, Emma.
- [06:32]
A
Sang is not authoritative. But Stephen Fry, I believe him.
- [06:35]
B
You and I have never read Jeeves before.
- [06:38]
A
We've never read Jeeves before. It's amazing to me that, like, I had never really stopped to think where the idea of a person named Jeeves being the ideal, like, manservant.
- [06:51]
B
Yeah.
- [06:52]
A
I just thought it was kind of a culturally 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, where that came from.
- [07:07]
B
Yeah.
- [07:09]
A
So, yeah, that it's a thing that somebody invented and then it just passed into like a Kleenex or Xerox.
- [07:16]
B
Like, yes.
- [07:17]
A
Common use.
- [07:18]
B
Well, and 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, well, yeah, that makes sense. I'm 10. That makes perfect sense.
- [07:36]
A
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 Bradbury stuff we just 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 collections.
- [07:59]
B
Carry On Jeeves. Yeah.
- [08:01]
A
Including some stories that were not about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, that were doctored to be about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. All these short stories are about, like, weird little farcical situations that people get themselves into. But Jeeves is not. Jeeves is in, like, half of them.
- [08:20]
B
Yes, sure.
- [08:21]
A
And the other. The other half of them are like, a prototype of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves employer. But he doesn't really have a butler most of the time.
- [08:33]
B
Yes. Okay. Well, let's talk about Mr. Woodhouse. PG aka Sir Pelham Grenville Woodhouse, aka Plummy, as some folks called him. He's born.
- [08:48]
A
I thought he. I thought it meant that it was a guy that you needed to have your parents around to.
- [08:53]
B
Well, it's funny you. 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 the idea for putting those letters together to say, you know, dangerous situations.
- [09:05]
A
Yeah. That was P.G. woodhouse Wodehouse.
- [09:09]
B
That's. Whoa. P.G. wodehouse. 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. 1881-1975 is just a very interesting, like, span of years to me.
- [09:39]
A
Yeah.
- [09:40]
B
He was.
- [09:40]
A
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.
- [09:51]
B
He 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.
- [10:06]
A
He could have. Could have been a big Kansas fan.
- [10:08]
B
Could have been a big Kiss fan. Just saying. P.G. simmons, World House. His father was a magistrate in Hong Kong and his mother 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.
- [10:35]
A
Ants occupy a strange position in this book that we can talk about. They're usually scary authority figures.
- [10:43]
B
A real Roald Dahl situation.
- [10:45]
A
Yes. Scary, joyless authority figures.
- [10:47]
B
He was educated at Dulwich College in London. He wasn't. 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. Or 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. Beginning in the 1930s, I read a nice long piece called A 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 beliefs. Kimball referred to it as something like, the IRS never found a big pile of money. It couldn't go after something like that. And so Woodhouse heads off to Europe in France. But wouldn't you know, World War II was happening.
- [12:19]
A
So, yeah, that put a. Put a damper on a bunch of people's plans, I feel like.
- [12:24]
B
So he does.
- [12:25]
A
That was a bad one.
- [12:26]
B
Get captured or, you know, taken in Berlin, or. He's taken to Berlin after being captured in France, where he made a. 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.
- [12:51]
A
What do you mean that they make light of being captured?
- [12:54]
B
So he was in various German camps for about a year, released in 1941, allowed to go to Berlin. 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 LE2K 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.
- [13:30]
A
So just kind of making. Just kind of making little funny jokes about it.
- [13:33]
B
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, you know, maybe betraying his country a little bit.
- [13:54]
A
How do you betray his country by making little jokes?
- [13:56]
B
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.
- [14:06]
A
Okay.
- [14:07]
B
And that the Germans were, you know, 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 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. It may, as I said to you today, it made AA Milne upset. And if you're gonna make the Winnie the Pooh guy upset, clearly you've done something.
- [14:48]
A
You better be. You better be ready to run, I guess.
- [14:53]
B
But Jeeves is, you know, one of his most famous creations. Named after a cricketer, Percy Jeeves, that he once saw play cricket and then.
- [15:07]
A
Who, as cricketers do.
- [15:09]
B
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 Jeevons.
- [15:28]
A
We saying valet? I thought it was valet.
- [15:31]
B
The British say valet, huh? Yep.
- [15:34]
A
British people can be wrong.
- [15:35]
B
You know, I watch that. This is what they say on Downton Abbey. I don't know what to tell you that it's a valid. Okay, you can say valet.
- [15:43]
A
I think they're both, you know, we can say valid. That's fine.
- [15:47]
B
They're probably both right.
- [15:48]
A
I just think of at least one time when the Brits were really wrong about. Oh, yeah, really wrong about something.
- [15:55]
B
And he. 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. I mean, maybe Jeeves, over time, 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, etc. It's, you know, 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 that Guy's Everywhere called Jeeves in 1975.
- [17:16]
A
And please tell me that it had an exclamation point at the end of Jeeves.
- [17:20]
B
It didn't.
- [17:21]
A
Oh, man.
- [17:22]
B
But nobody like, feels like it belongs there. And then 15 years later they came back or 15 or 20 years later they came back to it and rewrote it and called it By Jeeves, not Goodbye, but By Jeeves. Like I guess, like by gosh, like by Jove. Yes. So, yeah, that's. There's a lot of Jeeves out there. It's mostly a lot of short stories. There are, there are Jeeves novels, several.
- [17:49]
A
Jeeves novels, you know, like a lot of them.
- [17:51]
B
But this collection was published in 1919. A lot of the stories originally 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.
- [18:12]
A
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 Birdie Wooster, but he didn't have a cool butler who was trailing him around all the time.
- [18:31]
B
And then. Did you want to talk about Ask Jeeves at all, Andrew?
- [18:35]
A
I mean we can. I didn't bring anything. I didn't prepare any.
- [18:38]
B
Okay.
- [18:40]
A
It's search engine. And I do know that toward the end of its life, there's not a functioning search engine anymore.
- [18:46]
B
You can go to ask.com and there is. It mostly is pulling from a different search.
- [18:51]
A
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 Jeeves. They did kill Jeeves at some point in the 2000s because it used to like the branding used to be like a guy, a butler standing there with like a plate to give you all the Internet search results.
- [19:07]
B
They call. They called it Ask. 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 like pre made like knowledge capsule. 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.
- [20:03]
A
Huh.
- [20:04]
B
Which is basically what they're breaking search now to create. Yeah, except they spent time, like, actually writing these things.
- [20:12]
A
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 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 it, 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.
- [21:07]
B
Yeah, no, I don't think you're wrong there.
- [21:10]
A
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.
- [21:18]
B
But. And if you're wondering if you should launch a search engine of your own and have it, you know, be a publicly traded stock, 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 don't launch a search engine named after a butler, I guess, is the lesson.
- [21:41]
A
Yeah. Cause in the early days of the Internet, you know, it was all humans curating, like, these directories of pages. And then starting in the mid-90s and into the late-90s, you start seeing the rise of these, like, algorithm, these automated web crawlers that use an algorithm to. To crawl through all web pages that exist and, like, start putting up stuff that way. And yeah, there are a lot of people, there are a lot of companies experimenting in that. 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 crash and burn. Yeah, it's like these days, it's like Google is. Is huge. Bing has a little bit of it. I imagine at this point that, like, OpenAI or whoever is driving some amount of traffic and everything else is nothing. So.
- [22:34]
B
Yep. So you can't ask Jeeves anymore. But Andrew, I'm gonna.
- [22:39]
A
He's dead.
- [22:41]
B
In 2006, somebody claimed that he was the first Internet, like 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.
- [22:59]
A
Then get Clippy in the parade before.
- [23:01]
B
Giving an Internet company. Though Clippy lives on your computer. He doesn't need to be networked. Anyway, Andrew, I'm gonna ask you to come back after the break and tell me more about Jeeves.
- [23:24]
A
Craig, it's modern times and you and I do not have a butler or any other kind of attendant.
- [23:30]
B
Nope.
- [23:30]
A
Who brings us things when we ask and keep us from wearing weird ties or like, do anything for us.
- [23:37]
B
We do not have this.
- [23:38]
A
You have to turn to the Internet to do all this stuff.
- [23:40]
B
Yeah.
- [23:40]
A
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. People don't have butlers, and so they need you to make websites that can bring them things and answer questions for them and get them products and services and all kinds of stuff. And Squarespace can help you make all of those things. It can help you make a virtual butler who serves the people who visit.
- [24:06]
B
Yeah.
- [24:06]
A
And makes them feel taken care of. Just like Jeeves does for Birdie Wooster.
- [24:11]
B
Sure.
- [24:12]
A
They give you beautiful templates, easy to use, drag and drop tools, 24, 7 customer support, all kinds of other stuff that we're always talking about that makes Squarespace the digital butler for you. If what you need a butler for is to make you a website, I.
- [24:26]
B
Truly I am the Birdie Wooster of making a website. I don't know what I'm doing.
- [24:30]
A
I don't know how to do anything.
- [24:31]
B
And I turn to Squarespace, I say, squarespace, what am I doing? And they always have an answer.
- [24:37]
A
With Squarespace's collection of cutting edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business. Squarespace offers a complete library of professionally designed and award winning website templates with options for every use and category, no matter where you start. Your website is flexible to what you need with intuitive drag and drop editing, beautiful styling options, unrivaled visual design effects, and more ways to list what you offer. No experience required. You can also fundraise directly on your website. Grow your impact with built in donation tools. Create a professional on brand website that makes it easy to accept one time or recurring donations and engage supporters. With built in email campaigns and marketing tools, you can connect with your community and inspire more people to support your cause. Also, Craig Everydream needs a domain. Squarespace Domains makes it easy to find the best name for your business at one fair all inclusive price. No hidden fees or add ons required. Every Squarespace domain comes with advanced privacy and security tools included to ensure your domain remains online and protected. Don't wait to claim your name. Invest in your dream domain today. If any of this sounds good, go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com overdue to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com overdue to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
- [26:01]
B
Well, all right then, milord. Tell me where you'd like to go first here in this discussion of Jeeves.
- [26:12]
A
Not really how Jeeves talk. He says sir a lot.
- [26:14]
B
He says sir. He says sir a lot.
- [26:17]
A
These are two. These are two English men who are living in New York City.
- [26:21]
B
Oh, okay.
- [26:22]
A
Birdie Wooster and Jeeves.
- [26:24]
B
Birdie Worcester and Jeeves. Okay, great.
- [26:27]
A
And Birdie Wooster 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.
- [26:42]
B
Sure.
- [26:44]
A
Who just. 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.
- [27:21]
B
Okay.
- [27:21]
A
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, and Birdie is like, I. I could just. I could just tell. I. It's not that Jeeves says anything or does anything. He's just like, I can just tell that Jeeves is. Is upset at me, but I can't let this. This. But 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 Birdie 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. That's the end of the story. That's how a lot of them end.
- [28:10]
B
I have. I did, like, 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, like. And Jeeves has taken Umbridge and gone off to do whatever.
- [28:36]
A
And usually Jeeves is like. When he is solving these problems for Birdie, he's doing it quietly in the background so that Birdie doesn't even know what's happening until it's happened already.
- [28:46]
B
Great. So wonderful.
- [28:51]
A
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.
- [29:00]
B
Reggie Pepper is a great off brand name of something.
- [29:05]
A
It's a good name. And the voice is pretty, but you can see how he's sort of a precursor to the Birdie Wooster 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 for, like, he is not as unswervingly loyal to Reggie Pepper as Jeeves is to Birdie Wooster. But you can see sort of the nascent seeds of the dynamic that would become Birdie and Jeeves in that. But, yeah. So 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.
- [29:50]
B
Great. What is this story called?
- [29:52]
A
This is called Leave it to Jeeves.
- [29:54]
B
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.
- [30:06]
A
It's a much worse name. A considerably worse name. Here's. Here's how the story opens. 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.
- [30:23]
B
Neither of us have a good one.
- [30:24]
A
For some reason, because all of all of this is so English, like, so much of the language is just the most exaggerated old boy English accent. Possibly. Possibly. Imagine 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 Johnnies. I mean, you go up to them and say, when's the next train from Melon, Squashville, Tennessee? And they reply without stopping to think, 243, track 10, change at San Francisco. And they're right every time. While Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience.
- [31:04]
B
Melon, Squashville, Tennessee.
- [31:07]
A
Yeah, that's the name that he came up with for town in Tennessee. I don't know if that's offensive.
- [31:11]
B
I think 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.
- [31:29]
A
Yeah.
- [31:30]
B
Just packing stuff.
- [31:31]
A
Yeah, yeah. And then you. And then you just get fun in, like, 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. I'm not. I don't know everything about the English.
- [31:42]
B
Clearly.
- [31:45]
A
But he says something, quote, had the aspect of being the real red hot Tabasco.
- [31:50]
B
Yeah.
- [31:52]
A
Just like, as a way to say that something is the genuine article. That's the real red hot Tabasco.
- [31:58]
B
Yes. So he has an omniscient man.
- [32:02]
A
He is kind of an omniscient man who works for him and is so. 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. Like, 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.
- [32:32]
B
Sure.
- [32:33]
A
Okay, so in this. 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.
- [32:50]
B
And.
- [32:52]
A
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 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. Where nothing is really happening for you.
- [33:23]
B
Sure.
- [33:24]
A
And Corky has got like. That's some kind of, like an uncle or some kind of relative who doesn't. Who is providing like 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. In their good graces?
- [33:46]
B
I like this.
- [33:47]
A
So you can start mooching money off of them again.
- [33:49]
B
Yes, this is good. This good. Relatable problem.
- [33:54]
A
So Corki's thing is that he is taken up with some woman who is like a performer. She's. She's kind of not. Not somebody who Corky's relative would approve of. And so Corky is telling Birdie 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.
- [34:18]
B
Your.
- [34:18]
A
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 a book, 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.
- [34:55]
B
I love this.
- [34:56]
A
You can see where things are. You can see where things are gonna kind of get kind of. Kind of hairy here. There's just. This is too. It's too complicated. It's too contrived.
- [35:04]
B
Too many plates are spinning.
- [35:06]
A
Yeah. So they do this. They have. They have somebody basically ghost write a book about birds for this woman. And she sends a copy to Corky's uncle with thing about how much she admires him and how much she wants to meet him. And then they meet and then Birdie 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.
- [35:46]
B
But is. But is the uncle now in such a good mood that he's gonna, like, put the kid back on the largess?
- [35:52]
A
No, it's not even. It's not even. It's. It goes even further than that.
- [35:57]
B
Uh, oh.
- [35:58]
A
So, okay, he and this woman have a kid, have a child together.
- [36:03]
B
Wait, what?
- [36:04]
A
And they hire Corky to paint a portrait of. Because Corky. Corky's very sad about all about how all this has worked out. And they hire Corky to paint a portrait of her and this 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 baby in this whole situation. And so it looks like. It looks like all is. All is ruined. Like, Corky's uncle's really mad at him. He doesn't want the portrait. He's not going to 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, like, portrait painters and get more. Get more work.
- [36:56]
B
Okay?
- [36:57]
A
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. As a. As a comic series and have the newspaper buy it. And because this baby is so ugly and funny that it could be the. The basis for a successful comic strip.
- [37:23]
B
Okay.
- [37:24]
A
Rajiv says if I might make the suggestion, Mr. Corcoran, for a title of the series which you have in mind. The Adventures of Baby Blobs.
- [37:37]
B
Okay.
- [37:38]
A
And so he. And so he does it. He makes. He makes the adventures of Baby Blobs. He makes a comic strip about this ugly baby, and his fortunes are saved, and he's 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 Birdie Worcester is or if this was Jeeves grand plan for us all along, you know? Yeah.
- [38:11]
B
Yeah. Okay. So these are sitcoms. So these are, like, sitcoms.
- [38:17]
A
These are all very. It's all very sitcom.
- [38:19]
B
I love it. I love it.
- [38:21]
A
It relies on a lot of, like, miscommunication and, like, absurd circumstances and, like, weird characters showing up and throwing a wrench into things.
- [38:32]
B
Yes. Okay. 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.
- [38:42]
A
Let's leave it to Jeeves. And so all of these. All of these stories kind of turn on a similar sort of, like, scheme gone wrong that then goes right again by the end. Okay, Jeeves. And the unbidden guest is. There's a friend of Birdie's aunt, I think. And his aunt is mentioned, like, kind of hovers in the background of this as an imposing, horrifying figure who Birdie does not want to run afoul of. And, yeah, the Aunt Agatha is this woman's name. Okay. Aunt Agatha sent this woman to Birdie Wooster to help with a problem that she was having. And Birdie 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 pal. So 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 site, too small for anyone to live in with Aunt Agatha if she's really on the warpath.
- [40:10]
B
Oh, wow.
- [40:14]
A
So this. This friend of Aunt Agatha's has come to call on Bertie Wooster and has brought her horrible son Maudie.
- [40:23]
B
Okay, what's his problem?
- [40:25]
A
And she says I need to go write a book about all. A book? A book that's like an insider's view of America. Just like this one I did about India. It's gonna take me about a month to do all my. To do all my research. Can you hang out with my horrible son Marty?
- [40:43]
B
How old is Marty doing this?
- [40:45]
A
Marty's in, like, his 20s or something. It's not like it's not like a silly baby. He's a. He's an adult.
- [40:50]
B
This is not baby's day out. This.
- [40:51]
A
No, it's not. It's not baby's day out. He's an adult son.
- [40:55]
B
Okay, okay.
- [40:55]
A
Kind of guy. And so after this. After this friend of Agatha's leaves, Marty just goes. Goes wild. He's out every night.
- [41:08]
B
Yes.
- [41:08]
A
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.
- [41:20]
B
Oh, he's on Rump Springer. Okay.
- [41:22]
A
Yeah, a little bit. So Marty's doing all kinds of. Kinds of nutso stuff. 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 Birdie leaves for a little bit. He just needs to get out of there and stay with a friend because Maddie is driving him up a wall. And then when he comes back, he finds that Marty has been thrown into prison for carousing too hard.
- [41:57]
B
Okay, sure. Book gun.
- [42:00]
A
And he's like, this is great. This is awesome. For me, maybe being in jail for a while is just what this kid needs.
- [42:07]
B
Oh, no. And has Jeeves shown up at all in this process?
- [42:13]
A
Jeeves is around. Yeah, Jeeves is around. We'll. We'll get. Or we'll. We'll talk a little bit more. Where is Jeeves in this story? Jeeves is here.
- [42:22]
B
Marty's in jail. Okay.
- [42:23]
A
Lady Malvern is the name of the. Of the friend of Aunt Agatha's who's. Whose son. Maddie is.
- [42:29]
B
Great.
- [42:32]
A
And so Jeeves. So Lady Malvern shows up a little ahead of schedule.
- [42:40]
B
Oh.
- [42:41]
A
And Jeeves suggests to Birdie, well, why don't you tell her that Maddie 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 an idea of prison conditions in America. And I saw my son there in prison.
- [43:13]
B
Uh. Oh, the carceral state played you again, Bertie.
- [43:17]
A
And. And then. And then Jeeves. And then Jeeves clears his throat and is like, well, this is. This is all. You know, this is all a misunderstanding. Motti did go to prison to learn more about what being in prison is like for your book about America.
- [43:34]
B
And what a good lie.
- [43:36]
A
Lady Malvern buys it. And. 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 Jeep says something interesting. He says, I need to give. We need to. We need to see Marty 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 Maudie sent to prison.
- [44:29]
B
Jeeves, I bet you won't punch a cop.
- [44:35]
A
Mm.
- [44:36]
B
Jeeves.
- [44:37]
A
Yeah. Hmm.
- [44:40]
B
Okay. That's how that one ends.
- [44:42]
A
Yeah, that's how that one ends.
- [44:44]
B
Okay, great.
- [44:46]
A
Next story is Jeeves in the Hard Boiled Egg.
- [44:49]
B
Delicious.
- [44:51]
A
I think this is the one where it's Birdie's friend Bicky.
- [44:59]
B
Birdie.
- [45:00]
A
And Bicky is. He's. He's being cut off by a rich relative and Birdie needs to, like, help him get the money back.
- [45:08]
B
Okay, sure.
- [45:09]
A
And the scheme, like, the scheme that Jeeves helps them come up with is like, rubes in America will pay money to, like, shake a man's hand if they think that he's like, nobility from some other country.
- [45:23]
B
That's a good grift. Sure.
- [45:24]
A
So Bicky's relative is the. Yeah. Bicky's uncle is the Duke of Chiswick.
- [45:35]
B
Uh huh.
- [45:36]
A
And they come up with a scheme where people from out of town are gonna pay money to come and shake the Duke of Chiswick's hand.
- [45:46]
B
Okay, if you say so.
- [45:49]
A
Yeah. And it's. 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 Bicky keeps repeatedly bringing up this idea where if he just had a Little bit of capital. He could buy one chicken, and if he had. 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. You would get. Birdie has stupid friends. Like, as. As silly as Birdie is, his friends are usually.
- [46:45]
B
What I. 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.
- [47:05]
A
Or we can play off the. Yeah. The differences in societies a little bit too.
- [47:09]
B
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
- [47:11]
A
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's 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? And they'll probably buy it because it's so funny. And this one, the Duke of Chiswick doesn't want to 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.
- [47:59]
B
So blackmail.
- [48:00]
A
Yeah. And then Jeeves. Jeeves. So Jeeves saves the day again.
- [48:04]
B
Great. Thank you, Jeeves. How much. How much Reggie Pepper do you want to tell us about, Andrew?
- [48:13]
A
All the Reggie Pepper stories kind of bleed together for me a little bit. The funniest Reggie Pepper story.
- [48:19]
B
Is.
- [48:21]
A
Probably the first one. Well, no, okay, okay. There's. 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.
- [48:48]
B
Okay.
- [48:51]
A
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's 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.
- [49:41]
B
And so why were they in cahoots, though?
- [49:44]
A
I don't know why. I don't know why they were in cahoots. And then the, like. Like, it's. It's a. It's a. 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. Okay, 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.
- [50:11]
B
Great.
- [50:15]
A
The other Reggie Pepper story that I think is funny enough to talk about a little bit is 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. Some other dumb, dumb aristocrat friend.
- [50:36]
B
Yeah.
- [50:37]
A
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.
- [50:57]
B
Okay?
- [50:58]
A
Reggie Pepper says, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kidnap this child, and I'm gonna bring it to my friend, and he's gonna bring it to this. To this woman, and she'll be so overjoyed that her, like, charge has been returned to her, that he. That she will.
- [51:13]
B
That she will fall in love with a Classic jape.
- [51:16]
A
Yeah, 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.
- [51:57]
B
Okay? So now we're. Now we have a baby story.
- [51:59]
A
This is now 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. That 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, huh? And it's so contrived. And. And they keep giving this. This kid candy to get it to say, you know, kiss Freddy. Kiss Freddy. Because that's the line that this. This kid is gonna have that makes this whole thing come together.
- [52:39]
B
Okay?
- [52:40]
A
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.
- [52:48]
B
Yeah.
- [52:48]
A
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 she. It turns out that she is so. So touched by all of this that she does kiss Freddie. And they all get. They all get together, and that's the end of the story. It's a happy ending.
- [53:11]
B
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.
- [53:19]
A
We all have the mumps. You have to go take care of our baby.
- [53:22]
B
Very silly. Very silly. Was there one more Jeeves story that we didn't talk about?
- [53:28]
A
There's another Jeeves. Yeah. The book ends with a. With a 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 because they. Because 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 turns 25. And so they're going to get it, but then it turns out that this guy gambled all the uncle gambled all the money away and he doesn't have the money. But then. Okay, this is good.
- [54:12]
B
What, here's how I know this was a fun read is because I was like, all right, what, what stories do you need to yada yada. And you can't help but like uncork it and all the little. The snakes start popping out of the can.
- [54:24]
A
Yeah, yeah. I'm not. And I'm not. I'm not. I'm sure I'm not telling each of them because they all have all this like contrived, like multi camera sitcom.
- [54:35]
B
Yeah. That's the point where. Yeah.
- [54:37]
A
Where if you take like any given episode of like Friends, Seinfeld or something and you're trying to unpack it inside of three minutes, it's gonna sound like. It's gonna sound basically like this.
- [54:47]
B
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.
- [55:08]
A
Yeah, right.
- [55:09]
B
Yeah. Okay.
- [55:11]
A
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, 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.
- [55:51]
B
Oh my goodness.
- [55:53]
A
And then it turns out that the prince wakes up and he's 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.
- [56:11]
B
Of course it does.
- [56:12]
A
I do. It is interesting that it's. It's more of a. Like, you. You end this mostly on, like. It basically works out for everybody. And not like people miss out on, like, windfalls or other opportunities because there was so much chicanery and, like, contrived circumstance that sprung up around.
- [56:31]
B
It does always seem to circle back to what is a silly way for this to all be. Okay.
- [56:36]
A
Yeah.
- [56:36]
B
Yeah. Okay.
- [56:38]
A
The last Jeeves story. The last story in the collection is called the Ant and the Sluggard.
- [56:43]
B
Whoa.
- [56:43]
A
And Birdie's got another friend. His name's Rocky. And Rocky. Rocky is a poet who publishes roughly one poem a month and, like, 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 cool. The fun times he's having and all the fun stuff that he's doing.
- [57:24]
B
What an amazing premise and what a good premise.
- [57:27]
A
And Jeeves is like, well, you don't have to. You don't have to do it. What? 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 letters. 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 that 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, like, for this. For 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. Had been saying. And so he's like, well, it's only a Matter of time till the. Till the jig is up. And the solution that Jeeves contrives for this is to. 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 iniquity. Oh, God, Nobody. Nobody should be doing any of the. Of the nightlife because it's all immoral and awful and horrible. And then the aunt is like, man, Rocky, you need to. You need to get away from New York. I'll keep paying you the money, but you can't. You can't be in this terrible place anymore. And I don't. I don't want to be in this terrible place anymore either. And so the aunt leaves. Rocky doesn't need to live in New York anymore, and he doesn't. And he's still getting the money. And Bertie gets his house back and his butler back.
- [59:22]
B
Good job, Jeeves.
- [59:23]
A
And then again, the story closes on Birdie being like, yeah, that. That article of clothing that you hated, Jeeves, you can. You can get rid of it now.
- [59:32]
B
You know that everybody in 1916 is like, he said the thing. He said, get rid of the clothes.
- [59:40]
A
They're going.
- [59:40]
B
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 Birdie Wooster, but he's got.
- [59:52]
A
Birdie Wooster is, like, kind of a fun idiot, and he is. He is Watson esque. If, like, Sherlock Holmes was more, like, farcical.
- [60:00]
B
Yes. Yeah. Huh.
- [60:02]
A
Because Jeeves is like, the main character of the story, but you only really see him through this, through a remove and through the eyes of somebody who thinks he can do no wrong.
- [60:14]
B
Yeah.
- [60:14]
A
I think in later books, like, I only read some summaries of how the relationship develops. My understanding is that the Jeeves and Bertie stuff, like, it starts as short stories and it becomes novels eventually. And they are like, they're not peers exactly, because Birdie Worcester is Jeeves employer. But it is clearer that they're, like, friends and that there is some kind of, like, mutual respect between them.
- [60:40]
B
Yeah.
- [60:41]
A
But, yeah, like, mostly what I'm here for is like, oh, this is where. This is where sitcoms came from.
- [60:46]
B
This is.
- [60:46]
A
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 even, like, I Love Lucy, let alone like, any of the like, 60s, the other like 60s 70s sitcoms that you think of as really, like, perfecting this weird, like 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. That is playing in this. This.
- [61:17]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [61:18]
A
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.
- [61:42]
B
Yeah, that sounds great. Why would.
- [61:44]
A
I had a fun time with it. Like, I'm not. I'm not think. 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.
- [61:59]
B
That's going to be the high watermark for. For a while.
- [62:01]
A
Yeah. I mean, I just like Skeleton so much, but like, there's just so much goofy stuff happening in these.
- [62:07]
B
Yeah.
- [62:08]
A
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.
- [62:19]
B
Like, surface silliness of woodhouse. I have two quotes to share that seem relevant here. There 1. 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 Townen, 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 caring a damn. 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. They are kind of cordoned off from a world of consequence. Yeah, jail's a feature of course.
- [63:46]
A
But jail's a feature. But it's like, you know, it's like a temporary. It's like white, White man.
- [63:52]
B
Yes.
- [63:53]
A
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.
- [64:07]
B
No, you just get to go ask your aunt for more money and she gives it to you.
- [64:12]
A
Yeah.
- [64:12]
B
So thanks for reading about Jeeves, Andrew. You're welcome for letting me ask you about him.
- [64:19]
A
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.
- [64:29]
B
I did find them satisfying. If you, the listener at home, have any questions about Jeeves, you can send them to overdupodmail.com hit us up on social media verdupod. Thanks to Brenda, Robert and Elizabeth, many more for reaching out in the past week. Our theme song is composed by Nick l'. Arangis. Andrew, if folks want to know more about the show, where do they go?
- [64:54]
A
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 overdue pod 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 in our ongoing series the Sillymarillion. We also have a Discord community and ad free episodes and all kinds of other stuff up there. So patreon.com overdupod 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.
- [65:47]
B
You only make it the way you want it. Okay, yeah, stop complaining, everyone.
- [65:52]
A
What are we doing in November?
- [65:54]
B
Well, Andrew, just read My Man Jeeves by PG Wodehouse. Next week we'll be talking about Bel 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.
- [66:12]
A
All right, My man Jeeves, thank you for listening to our show and until we talk to you next week, please try to be happy. That was a hit. Gun podcast.
- [66:52]
C
What's going on. It's Lamorne Morris and Hannah Simone, and we host the Mess Around a New Girl Rewatch podcast. Now on now here's the thing. Every single week, we chat about an episode of New Girl. And we really get into it. Like, we get up in there. We get up in there. You know, we reminisce about our times on set. We share behind the scenes tea. We react to rewatching episodes that we haven't seen in years. We talk about how Jake Johnson is dog.
- [67:18]
A
That's not true. We talk about so many memories we have of working with the biggest stars on the planet. I'm talking Prince, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo.
- [67:30]
C
We're just two BFFs having a good old time.
- [67:33]
B
Okay?
- [67:33]
C
Sometimes we even talk to other co stars like Zooey Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, and Damon Waynes Jr. And your dad. We talk to your dad on this show as well.
- [67:42]
A
Make sure you subscribe to the Mess around wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every single Tuesday.