SOURCE: “Comedy Among the Modernists: P. G. Wodehouse and the Anachronism of Comic Form,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 114-38.

In the following essay, Mooneyham investigates Wodehouse's place in modern comedic literature.

The roof of the Sheridan Apartment House, near Washington Square, New York. Let us examine it. There will be stirring happenings on this roof in due season, and it is as well to know the ground. The Sheridan stands in the heart of New York's Bohemian and artist quarter. If you threw a brick from any of its windows, you would be certain to brain some rising young … Vorticist sculptor or a writer of revolutionary vers libre. And a very good thing too.

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Thus begins P. G. Wodehouse's 1927 novel, The Small Bachelor. “It is as well to know the ground,” indeed, because this particular roof will provide a stage for innumerable farcical events...