Laughing Gas has more outlandish situations than most Wodehouse novels and is also a satire of Hollywood culture, something that hasn't changed in the eighty years since this book was written. Is Laughing Gas the spiritual ancestor of later body-swapping comedies like Freaky Friday, Vice Versa, and that episode of Red Dwarf where Lister and Rimmer switch bodies? Yes, yes it probably is. Then the body swap happens and things go pear-shaped in a big way. It starts out with the old Wodehouse formula, a gentleman of leisure infatuated with a beautiful woman.
This is the first Wodehouse I've read in a couple years, recommended by none other than Gail Carriger at the 2016 Goodreads Summit. Will Reggie be able to set things right before Joey wrecks his life by punching everyone he dislikes in the snoot? After a strange incident in a dentist's office, Reggie swaps bodies with child star Joey Cooley. Reggie finds Eggy but falls in love in the process with April June.
When his cousin Egremont gets betrothed in Hollywood, Reggie Havershot has no choice but to go find him. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928). He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.īest known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.Īn acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death.
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