86 P. G. Wodehouse Quotes on Humor

P. G. Wodehouse quotes on humor

5. 'Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it.'

8. At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter a fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.

9. 'As a sleuth you are poor. You couldn't detect a bass-drum in a telephone-booth.'

11. There are some things a chappie's mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia singing 'Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay' is one of them.

18. Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

20. It was one of those cold, clammy, accusing sort of eyes--the kind that makes you reach up to see if your tie is straight: and he looked at me as I were some sort of unnecessary product which Cuthbert the Cat had brought in after a ramble among the local ash-cans.

25. As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across premieval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the familty circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.

26. It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

27. I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.

28. Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.

29. I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.

30. Anybody can talk me round. If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language.

31. 'Alf Todd,' said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, 'has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild-cat's ear with a red-hot needle.'

33. He resembled a minor prophet who had been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin.

34. He committed mayhem upon his person. He did everything to him that a man can do who is hampered with boxing gloves.

35. 'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

36. Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover.

37. Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

45. The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say `When!'

46. My Aunt Dahlia has a carrying voice... If all other sources of income failed, she could make a good living calling the cattle home across the Sands of Dee.

47. She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.

48. Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.

49. In one second, without any previous training or upbringing, he had become the wettest man in Worcestershire.

50. 'The modern young man,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'is a congenital idiot and wants a nurse to lead him by the hand and some strong attendant to kick him regularly at intervals of a quarter of an hour.'

55. You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.

56. Scarcely had I entered the sitting-room when I found ... what appeared at first sight to be the Devil, A closer scrutiny informed me that it was Gussie Fink-Nottle, dressed as Mephistopheles.

58. Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

60. There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots.

63. And a moment later there was a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and the relative had crossed the threshold at fifty m.p.h. under her own steam.

68. 'You're pulling my leg.'

73. In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.

76. And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.

81. Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution.

82. Contenting myself, accordingly, with a gesture of loving sympathy, I left the room. Whether she did or did not throw a handsomely bound volume of the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, at me, I am not in a position to say. I had seen it lying on the table beside her, and as I closed the door I remember receiving the impression that some blunt instrument had crashed against the woodwork, but I was feeling too pre-occupied to note and observe.

85. If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me.

86. 'Beginning with a _critique_ of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum.'

91. 'She loves this newt-nuzzling blister.'

93. It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.

95. If the prophet Job were to walk into the room at this moment, I could sit swapping hard-luck stories with him till bedtime.'

96. I charged into something which might have been a tree, but was not--being, in point of fact, Jeeves.

97. There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.

98. It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

99. A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.

100. Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed on Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude's word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said: 'Er, garcon.' 'M'sieur?' 'Er, garcon, esker-vous avez un spot de l'encre et une piece de papier-note papier, vous savez-et une envelope et une plume.' The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue. 'I want to write a letter,' he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have aded 'to the sweetest girl on earth' , had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings. 'V'la, sir! Zere you are, sir,' said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. 'Eenk-pin-pipper-enveloppe-and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.' 'Oh, merci,' said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency. 'Thanks. Right-ho.' 'Right-ho, m'sieur,' said the waiter.

102. 'Didn't Frankenstein get married?' 'Did he?' said Eggy. 'I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.'

106. 'Do you know,' said a thoughtful Bean, 'I'll bet that if all the girls Freddie Widgeon has loved were placed end to end-not that I suppose one could do it-they would reach half-way down Piccadilly.' 'Further than that,' said the Egg. 'Some of them were pretty tall.'

108. He then gave a hideous laugh and added that, if anybody was interested in his plans, he was going to join the Foreign Legion, that cohort of the damned in which broken men may toil and die and dying, forget. 'Beau Widgeon?' said the Egg, impressed. 'What ho!'

110. I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

111. Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin.

112. [of Spode] He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breath-taking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment.

113. It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

114. 'Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus?' 'No.' 'Revolting. It alters one's whole conception of Man as Nature's last word.'

116. The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?

119. There came from without the hoof-beats of a galloping relative and Aunt Dahlia whizzed in.

120. 'You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing.' 'No, sir.' 'One or the other. Not both.' 'Precisely, sir.'

121. 'You know your Shelley, Bertie!' 'Oh, am I?'

123. 'I want to know what the devil you mean by keeping coming into my private apartment, taking up space which I require for other purposes and interrupting me when I am chatting with my personal friends. Really one gets about as much privacy in this house as a strip-tease dancer.'

126. Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.

131. Bingo swayed like a jelly in a high wind.

135. His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his face had taken on the colour and expression of a devout tomato. I could see he loved like a thousand bricks.

137. On his good mornings, I don't suppose there are more than a handful of men in the W. 1 postal district of London swifter to spot oompus-boompus than Bertram Wooster, and this was one of my particularly good mornings. I saw the whole hideous plot.

143. We exchanged a meaning glance. Or, rather, two meaning glances, I giving him one and he giving me the other.

144. When news had reached me through well-informed channels that my Aunt Agatha for many years a widow, or derelict, as I believed it is called, was about to take another pop at matrimony, my first emotion, as was natural in the circumstances, had been a gentle pity for the unfortunate goop slated to step up the aisle with her - she, as you are aware, being my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon.

145. Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched earth policy on the bacon again.

147. On the cue 'five aunts' I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter, but the courage that one brings to them, I pulled myself together.

148. As far as the eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts. There were tall aunts, short aunts, stout aunts, thin aunts, and an aunt who was carrying on a conversation in a low voice to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention.

151. Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.

154. I agreed the situation was sticky. Indeed, offhand it was difficult to see how it could have been more glutinous.

156. Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock.

162. It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.

163. Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.

165. Whenever there is a job to be taken on of a kind calculated to make Humanity shudder, the cry goes up, 'Let Wooster do it.'

168. 'Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.' 'I couldn't be, I'm never up so early.'

169. 'When I say 'mind,'' said the blood relation, 'I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well.'

170. I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me.

171. I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't even put her in the oven.

173. He's engaged to be married to Stiffy Byng, and his long years of football should prove an excellent preparation for setting up house with her. The way I look at it is that when a fellow has had plug-uglies in cleated boots doing a Shuffle-off-to-Buffalo on his face Saturday after Saturday since he was a slip of a boy, he must get to fear nothing, not even marriage with a girl like Stiffy, who from early childhood has seldom let the sun go down without starting some loony enterprise calculated to bleach the hair of one and all.

177. I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, but he didn't. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly stiffness which you see in magistrates when they're fining people five quid for boyish peccadilloes.

179. I started back to the house, and in the drive I met Jeeves. He was at the wheel of Stiffy's car. Beside him, looking like a Scotch elder rebuking sin, was the dog Bartholomew.

182. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.

191. As he reached the end of the carpet and was about to turn and pace back again, he stopped abruptly with one foot in the air, looking so like The Soul's Awakening that a seasoned art critic would have been deceived.

194. I don't suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartar sauce.

195. 'I'm not speaking to you. I wouldn't speak to you if your shirt were on fire.'

196. Oofy, thinking of the tenner he had given Freddie, writhed like an electric fan.

197. She snorted with a sudden violence which twenty-four hours earlier would have unmanned me completely. Even in my present tolerably robust condition, it affected me like one of those gas explosions which slay six.

200. Well, you know what the Fulham Road's like. If your top-hat blows off into it, it has about as much chance as a rabbit at a dogshow.