#Thank You Jeeves

[beetle-goth]

So!! I had been listening to Thank You Jeeves and noticed another parallel between Jeeves and Bertie

Near the beginning of the book Chuffy asks Bertie if he can keep a secret and Bertie is flat out “no” and Chuffy is like. Fine whatever and tells him anyway (the secret was that he was in love with Pauline)

Later Bertie brings up Chuffy’s hesitation about marrying Pauline and being like the character Lord Wotwotleigh, Chuffy asks how Bertie could possibly know about that.

And Bertie is like: “well, Jeeves told me!” Chuffy is shocked that Jeeves told his secret like that. And for the duration of the book, everytime someone tells Jeeves something in confidence, Jeeves immediately tells Bertie. But I don’t think that’s just a gag for this book. Because in Code of the Woosters, Jeeves also sucks at keeping secrets from Bertie. He makes such a fuss about Eulalie and how he cannot tell Bertie about it because it’s a rule of the Junior Ganymede and he could get kicked out. And despite all this fuss and threat, he spills the whole secret to Bertie right at the end of the book!

TL:DR Jeeves and Bertie are both garbage at keeping secrets. If you tell Jeeves something, he’s telling Bertie and vice versa

[dathen]

Bertie kept referencing his “heliotrope pajamas” in Thank You, Jeeves so I had to look up what that meant and

Wildly, this was not brought up as something Jeeves objected to. Bertie can have little a purple in his life as a treat

[shittywriterbrain]

bertie is so fucking aro

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

While we’re on the topic of J&W characters being neurodivergent, Thank You, Jeeves contains one of the clearest descriptions of ADHD hyperfixations I’ve ever read

[ally-holmes]

This is so "two exes meet again" that it physically hurts.

[marilen13]

Love how in Thank you, Jeeves there's whole paragraph of how much Bertie doesn't want women in bed

[spotforme]

When i tell you that the 1936 movie Thank you, Jeeves is diabolical, i very well mean it! Let me recap some happenings from it so you'll understand better

It starts with Bertie playing the drums and Jeeves beside him, screaming on the phone to be heard over the 'playing'

Divorse is announsed within the first 5 minutes

A girl shows up in the night, witch means it's time for Jeeves to lock Bertie up in his bath-/bedroom for the night

They drive to a hotel together. On the way picking up a lifter and scaring him to death with Bertie's manic driving

There the gal who Bertie fell for threatens him with a gun

Jeeves is out singing and dancing along to a one man orchestra. His agressive dansing makes him fall through the floor.

More people threaten Bertie with more guns, having mistaken him as competent

Jeeves beats up close to 20 people while Bertie kinda just runs around..

Somewhere there Bertie gets engaged (by his own free will!)

The thing ends with Bertie shackled to a basement wall and this bit of dialogue between him and Jeeves:

"This place would be perfect for our honeymoon!"

"Your honeymoon, sir"

"You mean you're not coming?"

[idanit]

I haven't read "Thank You, Jeeves" yet so I should probably shut up, but "Sir Roderick Comes To Lunch" calls into question whether Jeeves truly has, or has ever had, a rule about not working for married gentlemen, like he says in "Thank You". It seems that in RODE, he acted when he learned that Honoria intended to fire him after she got married to Bertie. But if he had a rule about not working for married men, it wouldn't matter what Honoria thought of him, because he'd be out of the household anyway. It's almost like the actual rule Jeeves has is "I will do whatever it takes to keep Bertie for myself, and happy" (which means getting Bertie out of an engagement with a woman who makes him listen to her reading Ruskin and dislikes Jeeves, and also getting reunited with Bertie after Jeeves' brief stint with Chuffy).

[alexfireon]

What's the heterosexual explanation for this then

[kanadraws]

‘Jeeves,’ I said, I feel like a lost child that has found its mother.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘If you don’t mind me calling you a mother?’

‘Not at all, sir.’

‘Thank you, Jeeves.’

P. G. Wodehouse, “Thank You, Jeeves”

Jeeves does not mind Bertie calling him a mother. Not at all.

[teaspoonnebula]

Uh oh UH OH

Oh gosh how bad is this about to get... I'm still plucking up the courage to read on...

[semper-legens]

27. Thank You, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse

Owned: No, library Page count: 263 My summary: Thanks to his insistence on playing the banjolele, Bertie Wooster has been 1) kicked out of his flat and 2) dumped by Jeeves. But not to worry. He's out into the country, where nothing can go wrong! Except maybe love triangles, wacky escapades, imprisonment on a yacht, forced marriages, and a distinct lack of butter. Just his lucky day. My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

You know, despite my usual tastes in literature and my general predilection for the stuffy English gentleman, I've never actually engaged with any Jeeves and Wooster. I've seen clips from the Steven Fry/Hugh Laurie show, as every English person is legally required to, but I've never actually sat down to read any Wodehouse myself. Well, one of my coworkers is currently working her way through Jeeves and Wooster, and decided that I'd like it too. So, on her recommendation, I've gone in blind with this book. Let's see what it's like!

First off - Wodehouse's voice is delightful. Archaic without being impenetrable, sardonic and drawling, punning and witty in all the right ways. I was charmed and captivated from the start, not less because of how full-on it is right out of the gate. It's a very droll writing style, the kind that was definitely a spawn of the 30s; I can't imagine someone writing like that now except to satirise. Still, it's wonderfully charming. And Wooster himself is well-characterised as a complete brainless twit. He actually had a lot more heart than I was expecting from what I knew of his character, but he's still a big idiot who doesn't ever help himself out of any situation at all.

Also, like, I know calling Jeeves and Wooster gay isn't exactly the hottest of takes, but it surprised me just how gay it was. Seriously, Jeeves says that he's got a policy of never working for a married man. I can't be the only one reading implication into that. And he's always at Wooster's beck and call, even in this book where he's not technically working for him. (More on that in a bit.) And Wooster is not all that put out that the eligible young lady who is also his ex in this book isn't into him. In fact, he goes out of his way to avoid getting into a relationship with her! Any tension between them is coincidence and awkward encounters. Just…so gay.

Unfortunately with literature written in the early 1900s, and particularly literature by white people, you're gonna get some racism. In this book, it takes the form of the banjolele and the blackface. The former is the inciting incident for the novel; Wooster has to move to the country because he has taken up playing the banjolele, a cross between a banjo and a ukulele. Everyone hates the noise, but it's the instrument itself that's brought up as being the problem. Jeeves, in particular, hates it. The racial connotations of this can't be ignored - the banjo is associated with black Americans, where obviously the ukulele is a native Hawaiian instrument. But more egregiously, Wooster spends half the novel 'comically' in blackface. There is a never-seen troupe of minstrels referred to with the n-word - whether they are actually black or white people in blackface is unclear from the text, but apparently that was the contemporary term for blackface performers. And every person who sees Wooster in blackface assumes he's a devil and screams and runs away, again 'comically'. Look, I know this was written in 1934, but honestly I don't care. This is just straight-up racist. The idea of Wooster being blacked up is treated as hilarious rather than insulting, and of course not a single actual person of colour shows up at all. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, the casualness of these stereotypes and this behaviour. It's just bad. (And apparently, the TV episode based on this book also had the blackface in 1991. Plus ca change…)

Next, we're off to the Arctic, where there's a haunting on a beached ship…

[doyke]

just noticed a subtler reference in thank you jeeves in which bertie infers jeeves as his wife when "I had only to go and get in touch with him and he would bring out pounds of butter on a lordly dish" is in fact referring to himself as Heber the Kenite and Jeeves as Jael in Judges..

[therearenomorevalidblognames]

Thank you, Jeeves

P. G. Wodehouse

Joy in the Morning, Jeeves

P. G. Wodehouse

Enough with the gag in tv shows or books where characters talk ill of another character while they're right there in the room. Give me characters giving one the old oil as though the person weren't there.

Bonus:

Jeeves telling Bertie he's a knight in shining armor for volunteering to be a scapegoat

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

When your ex-fiancée knows you’re gay before you do

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

I love Jeeves’s little impromptu lectures so much and I like to think you’re right that Bertie lets him finish what he was saying later

As supporting evidence I offer this rare collaborative infodump from the end of Thank You, Jeeves:

(“that information gleam of his in his eyes”)

he’s just so excited to talk about poetry

Jeeves info dumping:

He does this sometimes with poetry, geography, clothes, and jewelry. It's lovely though ppl often cut him off :(. I like to imagine Bertie let's him speak later since he often says "nows not the time", "some other time" etc. when he does interrupt.