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   Zach Weinersmith (zachweinersmith@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:20:50 JST Zach Weinersmith

   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.

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     toybox [fr] (toybox@framapiaf.org)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:20:48 JST toybox [fr]

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     @ZachWeinersmith Normally AI shouldn't be that hard to defeat, as argued by a very wise tech-versed military historian : https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines

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     Zach Weinersmith (zachweinersmith@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:20:49 JST Zach Weinersmith

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     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.

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     Zach Weinersmith (zachweinersmith@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:20:49 JST Zach Weinersmith

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     Anyway this all relates to a project that'll probably appear... Winter 2025ish? Assuming AI has let us survive.

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     Zach Weinersmith (zachweinersmith@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:20:50 JST Zach Weinersmith

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     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.

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     Zach Weinersmith (zachweinersmith@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:20:50 JST Zach Weinersmith

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     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.

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     Rod (norwayjose@geekdom.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:21:57 JST Rod

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     @ZachWeinersmith Wodehouse made it look so easy. Few writers can compare with his uncanny ability to make me smile.

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     Zach Weinersmith (zachweinersmith@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:22:02 JST Zach Weinersmith

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     • Matt McIrvin

     @mattmcirvin Oh yeah, definitely. I think farce has to have stupid shallow characters who never evolve.

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     Matt McIrvin (mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:22:03 JST Matt McIrvin

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     @ZachWeinersmith Do you think the punch-card property actually contributes to the comic effect of the stories? Thinking of Henri Bergson's theory of comedy emerging from "the mechanical layered on the living".

     (The simplicity of it might help make the stories comforting to read.)

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     Gavin Anderegg (gavinanderegg@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:22:08 JST Gavin Anderegg

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     @ZachWeinersmith I knew nothing of Wodehouse until now. His Wikipedia entry (especially around World War 2) is quite the trip! Interested to find out later what you’ve been working on, and to check out some of Wodehouse’s work.

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     Sandra Bond (klepsydra@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:22:14 JST Sandra Bond

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     @ZachWeinersmith most writers who write a very large amount of essentially similar books develop a deck of cards which they become adept at shuffling and dealing in a slightly different way every time -- similar enough to previous ones to keep their fans happy but different enough to keep them from complaining. Agatha Christie is another example of this technique.

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     Dave T-W (davoloid@qoto.org)'s status on Friday, 28-Jun-2024 03:22:20 JST Dave T-W

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     @ZachWeinersmith You've piqued my interest, never picked him up but in my youth I did enjoy the TV series with Fry & Laurie.

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