the Scott Stein

I just read my first "Jeeves" novel, The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse. I'll write about it separately as a Book Note.

Jeeves is the prototypical super-butler always saving the day, always calm, possessing the most level head in time of crisis. Bertram Wooster is the wealthy gentleman always finding trouble. Lucky for him that he has Jeeves by his side.

Of course, portraying the rich as buffoons and their servants as sophisticated or witty is a well-worn comic premise, and the Wodehouse model has many recent echoes--think of Benson in Soap and Benson, Florence in The Jeffersons, the movie Arthur, the TV show Mr. Belvedere. Can you name others? I'm sure there's a long history of this going back way before Jeeves.

Aside from comic strategy, though, is there anything else at work in this narrative model? Psychological comfort for the poor to see the rich portrayed as stupid or concerned only with the trivial? Wishful thinking, that the only reason the rich are rich is the good fortune of birth?

Not that anything in Wodehouse's funny novel ought to be taken seriously. Using the wealthy as comic foils is fine by me. I did a fair bit of this in my first novel Lost. I guess I was less ideological then. Still, whatever gets the laugh.