The prelapsarian humor of P.G. Wodehouse

Philosopher C. Stephen Evans reviews a biography of Wodehouse for Books & Culture (via Thunderstruck), offering some reflections on why Wodehouse is so beloved and seems to be more than a “mere” humorist:

According to Kierkegaard, the fundamental contradiction that is human existence can be experienced as either tragic or humorous, depending on our perspective. To smile at life (or anything), we must be able to occupy a “higher perspective,” which makes the “contradiction” painless. This is surely why so many situations that are painful at the time can be funny in retrospect; the person remembering the incident is beyond or above the contradiction, and this distance is a necessary condition for humor. Thus, to view life itself as humorous, to vary the metaphor, we must have a way of escape, “know the way out.”

But which do we do? The Christian, for example, knows the tragedy of the fall, but also knows the good news of God’s grace and forgiveness. According to Kierkegaard, the character he calls the “humorist” lies on the boundary of the religious life because the humorist has somehow acquired a “knowledge” of these religious insights. The humorist fails to be genuinely religious because this knowledge is a kind of merely intellectual appropriation of those insights; the humorist does not really take these religious convictions into the core of his or her own existence. If we shift focus from religion in general to Christianity in particular, perhaps humorists can be viewed as people who help themselves to the solution Christianity offers to the problem of human life without fully plumbing the depth of the problem itself.

I think that Kierkegaard’s description of the humorist fits the case of Wodehouse precisely. We love the world of Wodehouse because it is paradise, a world without sin. Of course Wodehouse has villains and intimidating aunts, but they are amusing rather than genuinely evil. We love the world of Wodehouse because it is the world we were born to live in, and it is a world in which we would love to dwell. Yet, as [Evelyn] Waugh himself clearly said, Wodehouse’s world is a world to escape to, not a world we aspire to find or create. It is not paradise regained but paradise never lost. Sin has here not been defeated; it has never really appeared.