Thursday, March 23, 2006

Master of humour

I started reading PG Wodehouse again and I find these books as hilarious as I used to when I was in school! The typical British backdrops, the descriptions of the wonderful English countryside, the super-cool English exclamations(By Jove!!) and of course Bertie and Jeeves. They are all back in my life and I'm delighted!

One among the many things I love about these (and other writings of humour by some good English authors) is their refusal to take any character or any situation seriously. I mean, if some of the things in these stories had happened to me or to people around me, they would have been shattered! But you end up in guffaws when you are reading these situations in these books!

Like, there is one particular story where a poor unemployed painter guy wants to marry his girlfriend but he knows his rich uncle(who gives him a quarterly allowance) will never agree. Now this uncle of his has ornithology(study of birds, bird-watching) as a passion and has written books on it. So the painter guy's girlfriend writes another book on birds and praises his uncle's books to no end all over in her book. The uncle is extremely impressed and invites the girl home. And guess what, uncle gets married to the girl!! And he asks the painter guy to paint a portrait of his baby son with the painter's ex-girlfriend!!

Just love these books!

1 comment:

Ashwin said...

Oye? Was it a big story?Cos u summed it up pretty well! They both get married after seeing and then in the next line the painter is painting pic of their kid.