Sumptuous
Buffoonery: The Continuing Appeal of ‘Jeeves and Wooster’
A
combination of Fry and Laurie's talents and timeless source material keeps
Jeeves and Wooster funny more than 20 years later.
By
PopMatters
Staff
/ 12
September 2016
So much of
Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s appeal appears to lie in the clash of attitudes
they had between themselves and other comedy partnerships. The gothic
interpretation of Laurel and Hardy as demonstrated by Rowan Atkinson and Tony
Robinson in Blackadder, and the live-action Looney Tunes mentality of Rik
Mayall and Ade Edmonson may have been riotous company to keep. However, keeping
such company resulted in a space being left for the calmer, gentler approach
that Fry and Laurie would adapt for the bulk of their working partnership,
culminating in Jeeves and Wooster, that period piece of delightfully nincompoop
misadventures experienced by England’s elite.
Airing
between 1990 and 1993, the dramedy is just one chapter in the then
still-flowering Fry and Laurie double-act, although given the duo’s desire to
bring P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster and Reginald Jeeves from page to screen,
this was surely the fruits of their labors. There you have an integral element
of Jeeves and Wooster‘s continued appeal: the effortless charms of Fry and
Laurie. The duo are so enveloping in their performances that they envelop both
themselves and the audience.
Much of the
enjoyment of witnessing Fry and Laurie bounce off each other’s perfectly-timed
mannerisms can obviously be traced back to their halcyon Cambridge days, but
for us audiences, the seeds were sown with A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and even
perhaps a bit of Blackadder. Between those two shows, Stephen and Hugh
demonstrated how feather-smooth their on-screen relationship was, which was
made all the more apparent thanks to the backdrops of A Bit of Fry and Laurie‘s
harsh deadpan nature, and Blackadder‘s decadent re-writing of history.
Even one-off
appearances in The Young Ones and Filthy, Rich and Catflap gave evidence to how
the pair were so entwined in each other’s comic deliverance. They were the
middle class double act that the everyman could be, and were, a fan of. This
was perhaps thanks to how self-destructive their pre-Jeeves and Wooster output
was in their nature. The satire of A Bit of Fry and Laurie seemed rooted in how
the middle class viewed the world — a world in which Fry and Laurie were
perhaps born into — whilst such appearances on Blackadder, The Young Ones, and
Filthy, Rich and Catflap were routinely aggressive, making them perfect
additions for such shows.
However,
just how much of the humor of Jeeves and Wooster is owed to Fry and Laurie?
When you remove those two star attractions, do you still have a devastatingly
British witty show?
In short —
yes. The wit and the charm remain, but after all, how legitimate is a TV show
when you remove the main characters? Such as question plays well into the
theory that there’s more to Jeeves and Wooster than Bertie and Reginald, when
this series shows us a world populated by a multitude of jobless yet wealthy
buffoons like Bertie, and an army of black-suited manservants on hand ready to
pluck said buffoons out of mischief, just like Jeeves.
What makes
this duo stand out isn’t just their actors, but rather, the individuality they
have as characters, in both their relationship and their personalities. If you
passed Bertie Wooster on the street, chances are you’d find him a somewhat
despicable fellow. He remains unemployed throughout the four series, thinks
little of the bigger picture, and is incompetent in almost every ill-conceived
plan he hatches.
Despite all
this, he remains an immensely likeable person, perhaps more so than the other
young-minded fools he rubs shoulders with. You feel your heart pouring out to
him as he’s routinely hard done-by by an unstoppable army of volatile aunts and
roguish love interests.
In the
background of all this chaos, you have the unassuming Jeeves, just one fixer of
problems who was probably created in a factory somewhere that specializes in
churning out manservant after manservant. He’s as much the parent of Bertie as
he’s the sibling, often becoming seemingly intentionally dragged down to the
consequences of the shenanigans Bertie finds himself in, whether or not they’re
his doing.
That
equality radiates sublimely, due as much to the characters as the actors
themselves. Jeeves and Wooster appear to have a far more equal relationship
than the other manservant/buffoon combos seen throughout Jeeves and Wooster.
Bertie may separate himself from Jeeves when attempting to outdo him with his
own plans to either rid himself of the wrong woman or to help others secure the
right one. Jeeves often elevates himself to being the superior of the duo by
freeing Bertie from the shackles of potential soul-crushing marriages when his
own plan go awry.
Yet they
routinely find equal footing from the episode’s beginning to its end, with the
middle displaying their individualities and why they’re both so suited to each
other’s needs.
If anything,
Fry and Laurie’s effortless contributions almost come across as a refreshing
tonic to the oddly regular cast changes throughout the four series. We almost
have as many Aunt Agatha’s as we do series. Madeline Bassest, Florence Craye,
Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Sir Roderick Glossop all suffer the same fate. They’re
all portrayed by an enormity of actors, who all bring an enjoyably professional
attitude to Wodehouse’s characters, but some have more gravitas than others.
Another
jewel in Jeeves and Wooster’s crown is scriptwriter Clive Exton. Responsible
for scripting all 23 episodes, his stories capture a condensed wit that stays
true to Wodehouse’s original novels whilst at the same time playing fast and
loose with their structure. Stories unconnected in their original novel form
are weaved together, two or three at a time, and strung out into cohesive
escapades of misjudged marriages, antagonizing aunts, and thefts of policemen’s
helmets.
It’s a
testament to Jeeves and Wooster‘s continued appeal that despite Fry and
Laurie’s overpowering star attraction, the world of Jeeves and Wooster is as
much the star of the show as the lead duo themselves. Outwardly a world
dominated by the upper classes, their pomposity is either accepted as the norm
or it’s glossed over by this world’s other inhabitants. For us viewers however,
it’s laid out in its barest form.
We see so
much of the ineptness of how this world’s populace operate that we wonder how
they survive. The elders are only concerned with status and human reproduction.
The females appear only concerned with marrying inappropriate suiters in an
attempt to mold them into something that doesn’t exactly meet their standards,
but merely to assert their own dominance, and the men appear only concerned
with living in the here and now. The only tug at their 24-hour party lifestyles
is that of hopelessly falling in love with some toothsome filly who’s either
unsuitable, unavailable, or simply impossible.
It’s an
extremely abstract world that masquerades as a low-key imagining of high
society. The deft fusion of word-heavy wit and charismatic performances from
the cast paint a very clear picture as to why Jeeves and Wooster continues to
remain a joy to watch. Perhaps there’s more to Jeeves and Wooster than Fry and
Laurie after all.
By day, Fred
McNamara works as a broadcast journalist for local television; by night, he’s a
vigilante of popular culture. He writes about films, TV shows, comic books and
novels for a variety of websites and magazines, including ScreenRelish,
Starburst Magazine, and Andersonic. He’s also the senior editor for the
superhero/indie comic book website A Place To Hang Your Cape.