Wodehouse cracks me up discussion

Why are the most wonderful things in life unhealthy or outrageously expensive? If bacon and eggs don’t stop your heart cold, a pint at your local pub will destroy your liver. Survive these menaces and not one in a baker’s dozen of you will step from the pub to find your chauffeur waiting with a classic Bentley to whisk you off to your personal yacht. Yet the poorest and unhealthiest amongst you can step into your local bookseller’s shop and for a pittance purchase perfection. The worlds of Wodehouse beckon to all offering happiness unspeakable and full of Joy.

I also purchased perfection after reading one of his books [Right Ho, Jeeves] in the form of a yellow rubber duck. According to Bertie Wooster:

The discovery of some toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the merry old Bertram.

(I love you both so much)

PG Wodehouse had a big heart and could be quite generous with his friends. His support of old-school chum and failed writer William Townend might have surprised anyone who knew just how much cash the successful wordsmith had funneled to the unsuccessful journeyman scribe.

A suggestion that William made in the exceptionally early 1900s helped balance this seemingly one-sided relationship. As we will see in a nonce or two, a young Pelham Grenville began his lifetime of writing with a string of schoolboy novels and for all we know might have continued in this vein for decades to come. It was his old deskmate William who said, ‘Why not try writing something for all these adults I see roaming the streets?’ So it was that Wodehouse unleashed the typewriter and created his first adult novel and his first memorable character.

Ukridge was always closer to an anti-hero than a hero and something of a divisive figure in Wodehouse fandom. Later short stories about the man would make him if anything more of a scoundrel. If Arthur Conan Doyle had taken time out from writing Sherlock Holmes to pen the occasional Raffles story, you would have had a similar effect.
I suspect that understanding the experimental background that birthed Ukridge helps us to comprehend both the character and the attachment that Wodehouse felt for the character. As Wodehouse tried to find a formula for future success, he would co-write the semi-autobiographical novel Not George Washington with Herbert Westbrook. Here he would complain that he had never been allowed to show his sense of humor because all editors wanted from him were school adventures. You can almost feel the pain of some of the later writers of the Hardy Boys pumping out novel after novel for 75 bucks per.
PG and HW also penned The Globe by the Way Book when he was working for the newspaper The Globe. This silly little compilation was meant to entertain riders on the vast English train system and was not unlike writing for New York subway sufferers today. Wodehouse also gave invasion comedy a try with The Swoop! which saw England invaded by nine separate armies and was saved by the boy scouts. The clever idea was sabotaged by comparatively poor execution especially given the brilliance that Wodehouse would display in the future.
It wasn’t until 1910 and A Gentleman of Leisure that another solid comedy would flow from his pen making Ukridge his only successful comedic creation for close to half a decade. Small wonder than that Wodehouse would return to this quirky character for short stories time after time.