Evelyn Waugh, in a tribute to P. G. Wodehouse delivered on the BBC on July 15, 1961, zeroed in on a theological ground for the unmatched appeal of Wodehouse's fiction:

For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no "aboriginal calamity." His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. The chef Anatole prepares the ambrosia for the immortals of high Olympus. Mr. Wodehouse's world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

A deeply Catholic novelist such as Waugh knows what sin is and notices its absence. The first time I read this often-quoted praise, I immediately thought, "Of course," and I understood why Wodehouse is a writer who is not merely enjoyed but deeply loved.

I had for many years been a Wodehouse lover, beginning with Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, moving on to Lord Emsworth, the Empress of Blandings (a pig) and the Blandings Castle stories, and experiencing sheer bliss when I discovered that Wodehouse had actually written some golf stories. For several years I struggled with a phobia about flying, and there were many times when the only way I could get myself to board a plane was to walk onto the jetway clutching an unread Wodehouse novel. Waugh had it exactly right; to enter the Wodehouse world is to enter a world with no sin, and no real horrors. In that world no planes fall from the skies.

I am certainly not alone in my love of Wodehouse. According to Robert McCrum's biography, there is a long roster of distinguished admirers in addition to Waugh, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Balfour, Hilaire Belloc, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Eudora Welty, Ogden Nash, John le Carré, and Salman Rushdie. Incredibly, all of Wodehouse's books—of which there are more than 100—are still in print. How does one explain this level of devotion towards a writer of comic "light fiction," who viewed his own work (at least initially) simply as a way to make a living that would be more satisfying than working in a bank?

Like many Wodehouse readers, I knew little about the man behind the books, and so, when given a copy of McCrum's highly praised Wodehouse: A Life for Christmas last year, I dove into the book with much anticipation. McCrum's biography was not a disappointment, unless one measures it by the pleasures obtained from one of Wodehouse's own works.

McCrum has done his homework, and knows how to tell a tale; his version of Wodehouse's life contains many fascinating vignettes. Guided by McCrum's authorial governance, Wodehouse moves before our eyes from what appears to be a sad and lonely childhood, through the experiences of a typically English "public school" (Dulwich), to the crushing news that he would not be allowed to go up to Oxford as he had thought, but would have to enter the "real world" of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. As a young man of about 21, Wodehouse courageously quit his day job and resolved to make a living with his typewriter, churning out light verse, short stories, lyrics for songs in musical comedies (both in London and on Broadway), and of course comic novels.

McCrum gives a balanced treatment of perhaps the saddest episode in Wodehouse's life: his tragic decision, after being captured and interned by the Nazis during World War II, to give some radio broadcasts over German radio to be aimed at his American readers. (The United States was not yet in the war.) Though politically naïve, Wodehouse was absolutely not a Nazi sympathizer, and the biggest mistake of his life is best explained by Wodehouse's innocent—yet somehow still culpable, if innocence can be culpable—inability to see that his desire to thank his American audience for their continued loyalty would be used by the Nazis for their own ends. The broadcasts themselves are hilarious in the typical Wodehouse manner:

Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me, "How can I become an Internee?" Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.

These broadcasts, then, for which Wodehouse would pay dearly, since he was never again able to return to England, are attributable to the same innocence that Waugh finds in Wodehouse's prose and that almost everyone who knew Wodehouse personally found in his character. Even when captured by the Nazis, Wodehouse appears to live in Eden.

The basic goodness of Wodehouse comes through in McCrum's volume in many ways: the great loyalty Wodehouse showed to his friends (secretly providing financial support to some less successful than himself), his long and happy marriage to Ethel (already twice widowed), his devotion as a father to Ethel's daughter from a previous marriage, his lifelong joy from animals (particularly dogs), his many years of hard and honest work as a writer who honed his craft industriously, and the satisfactions he took from simple pleasures in the great outdoors such as walking and swimming. However, though McCrum sheds light on many puzzling and interesting details in Wodehouse's life (I had no idea how involved Wodehouse had been in musical theater), there remains an element of mystery in the attraction of Wodehouse's work: Why should books replete with silly characters and contrived plots produce so much admiration and love from so many readers? The fact that the books are genuinely funny hardly seems an adequate explanation. Or am I here making the same mistake so many critics contemporaneous with Wodehouse made, treating him as a lightweight because he is a comic author?

After all, as many a stand-up act has confirmed, dying is easy; comedy is hard. Why do we humans laugh anyway? Why do we sense that humor, at least some humor, points to something deep about the human condition?

Theologian Tom Oden has recently published The Humor of Kierkegaard, which not only contains many of Kierkegaard's funniest jokes and stories but also argues that Kierkegaard is hands-down the funniest philosopher in Western history. Some might think the competition for this prize was not too challenging, but Kierkegaard is genuinely funny; he not only writes wittily but also offers some provocative reflections about the place of humor in human life and its relation to religious existence. I think that some of Kierkegaard's thoughts on humor may shed some light on the appeal of Wodehouse and the insight that lies beneath the Waugh tribute.

Kierkegaard affirms, contrary to the common stereotype of the religious believer as dour and overly serious, that there is a close connection between humor and religion, a connection that is especially tight in the case of Christianity, which Kierkegaard calls "the most humorous view of life in world-history."1 Kierkegaard affirms that the character he calls "the humorist" lies on the border of true religiousness, and even that humor constitutes the outward disguise or "incognito" of the genuinely religious person.

All humor, on Kierkegaard's view, revolves around an experience of what he calls a "contradiction," but which might better be described as an incongruity. We smile at the "contradiction" between the upward gaze and downward ascent of a comedian doing a pratfall; we laugh at a German-Danish clergyman who intones from the pulpit that "The Word was made pork," being fooled by a false cognate between the German Fleisch and the Danish Flæsk. (These are both Kierkegaard's examples.) Humor in general strikes us as "deep" because it points to the fundamental incongruity or contradiction that lies at the heart of human existence, which is a never-completed "synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal." Human life is a continual attempt to realize in time ideals, such as justice, which as ideals are timeless. However, when we look at the gap between our ideals and our achievements we cannot help but laugh or cry.

But which do we do? 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."

It is here that religion and specifically Christianity come into the picture, because a religious life view typically offers just such a "way out." 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 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.

One might object that such a theological reading of Wodehouse must be off the mark, since McCrum assures us repeatedly, as if he needs to reassure himself, that Wodehouse did not have much interest in religion, remaining "strenuously agnostic." I could respond by citing Kierkegaard's claim that humor can in some cases be the outward disguise that covers a genuinely religious "inwardness." However, there is much evidence in McCrum's own book that agnosticism is not the whole story when it comes to Wodehouse's life view. Wodehouse was certainly not conventionally religious or a regular churchgoer, and he probably lacked settled religious convictions. When asked about his religious beliefs, Wodehouse said that "it was 'awfully hard to say' if he had religious beliefs. 'It varies from day to day. Some days I have, and other days I haven't.' " To me that sounds like a man who finds religious questions deeply interesting, but who cannot find his way to a settled faith. Wodehouse was agnostic to be sure, but an agnostic who was concerned about religious questions, a hypothesis that is confirmed by his deep interest in and actual involvement at times with spiritualism.

In any case it is not necessary to see Wodehouse as conventionally religious in order to recognize him as fitting Kierkegaard's category of the humorist who has a knowledge of the religious life but has not been transformed by it. In fact, Wodehouse fits this description perfectly. He was brought up in a Christian environment; parish priests are as much a natural part of his fictional world as are earls and good-for-nothing aesthetes. He effortlessly absorbed what we might call the stored-up capital of Christianity, and drew on those stores without drawing undue attention to the source. Wodehouse embodies what William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, calls the "once-born" type of religiousness, the religious person who confidently trusts in the basic goodness of the world and the self.

How could a Christian like Waugh express love for a writer who ignores the reality of sin? If Wodehouse attempted anything like realism, his fictional paradise would indeed be a snare and a delusion. But despite its colorful and concrete locations in London and the English home counties (and occasionally New York), Wodehouse's world is obviously one that does not and cannot exist on this earth. Indeed, it draws us in by powerfully expressing our desire for a different world, one which the Christian knows cannot be entered by escaping time but only by embracing the God who himself entered history. After all, in Wodehouse, not even golf is frustrating—and no golfer will be tempted to confuse this world with the one we actually live in.

C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Baylor University. He is the author most recently of Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford Univ. Press).

1. SØren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), Vol. 2. Entry 1681.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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