So, for a project I'm reading a lot of Wodehouse. I'd read a lot of it before, but this time more analytically. An interesting thing is just how much he gets away with by being slow and funny. There's a scene in one of his books where Bertie is grumpy, then finds a rubber duckie. There's a whole paragraph by Bertie describing how to operate the duck. Seems like a complete throwaway gag, and an excellent one, BUT the real trick is he did a bit-flip on Bertie, who goes from sad to happy.

I think what was likely going on is that for plot purposes he needed Bertie's mood to change. In most authors' hands, and even Wodehouse's in most cases, the move here is to rejigger prior plots to arrive at the correct mental state. But because Wodehouse is so funny and clever, he's able to essentially just assert the mood change, and you don't even notice. In fact, you'd like to read more.

I think one of the keys with Wodehouse is that his characters are much more like punch cards than people. Like, for a given character their personality, motives, and the state of their relationships to the other characters could be listed with complete thoroughness on a postcard. They are uncomplex. What scenes do is they alter a number of states on each character, e.g. who they're in love with, are they in a good mood, etc.

And so the game is just a rich and surprising set of flips in state, over and over and over, with greater urgency and seemingly less chance of happy resolution, until by some scheme everything is saved at the last second. The reason he gets away with such a complex abstracted notion of plot is that the scenes themselves can be quite slow, e.g. a person will pause to explain everything so far, or a piece of dialog will be ultra-repetitive, or a person will sit and play with a duck for no reason.