...this isn't Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban...
It's Saturday! It's after midnight! I am up and looking out the window and there are kids and adults on the street coming back from the bookstore and some of them are wearing wizard hats and waving wands and they are heading home and the have bookstore bags with big books stuffed inside them and they are laughing and smiling and so happy...
'Hell!' I cried.That's about as technical an explanation as we're going to get, because the why doesn't matter as much as the what happens next. And what happens next? Why, hilarity, of course...did you think anything else could? Reggie-in-Joey's-body is trapped under the stern guardianship of Miss Brinkmeyer (sister of Hollywood mogul T.P. Brinkmeyer), a classic Wodehouse wicked witch in the vein of Lord Emsworth's sister Connie and Mrs. Huddington from last week's The Small Bachelor. Forced to exist on a diet of prunes and roped into embarrassing public appearances, Joey's struck back in the past by planting strategic horned toads and frogs in Miss Brinkmeyer's bed, a plan of attack that seems perfectly apt to Reggie in the same Buster Browns. Meanwhile, now in the beefy brawny body of Reggie, Joey's out and about Hollywood punching in the snoot everyone on his extensive "enemy's list"...from gossip columnists to movie critics to his hated co-star April June. Will Reggie-as-Joey break out of Brinkmeyer Manor in time to prevent Joey-as-Reggie from giving Miss April June a fistful of fives? How will he get enough spending money to bribe Chaffinch the butler to bring his sausages instead of prunes for his breakfast? And what will happen when the Hollywood press photographs young Joey, darling of millions, puffing on a cigar and downing a whisky?
Well, I mean to say, who wouldn't have? I saw right away what had happened. Someone, as the poet says, had blundered. Joey Cooley and I must have gone under gas at exactly the same moment and, owing presumably to some bad staffwork during the period when we were simultaneously sauntering about in the fourth dimension, or whatever they call it, there had been an unfortunate switch. The impetuous young cuckoo had gone and barged into my body, and I, having nowhere else to go, had toddled along and got into his.
His fault, of course, the silly ass. I had told him to stop shoving.
'I don't want to,' I said.There's a lot of good-natured and gentle but pointed humor at the expense of the tropes of Hollywood in here as well, from poking fun at film star fan clubs and personal appearances to the rage over collecting memorabilia of the stars. Well before eBay and certificates of authenticity, the Brinkmeyer's butler suggests he can sell Joey's extracted tooth to a movie magazine for a couple thousand dollars:
'Want to?' The Brinkmeyer came through with one of her well-known snorts. 'It isn't a question of what you want, it's a question—'
'Of modesty,' I thundered, cutting her short. 'The whole matter is one of principle. One has one's code. To a bath, qud bath,' I said, borrowing some of old Horace Plimsoll's stuff, 'I have no objection whatever. In fact, I should enjoy one. But when I am asked to countenance turning the thing into a sort of Babylonian orgy—'
The Brinkmeyer looked at Ann.
'What is he talking about?'
'I don't know. He's funny to-night.'
'He doesn't amuse me.'
'Think, sir, think! Reflect what a position you hold in the public esteem, sir. You are the Idol of American Motherhood. And the fans are inordinately desirous of obtaining souvenirs of their favourites, I can assure you. I have known large sums to change hands for one of Mr Fred Astaire's trouser buttons, very large sums indeed. And the human appeal of a trouser button cannot be compared with that of a tooth.'The butler, of course, not only swindles Reggie but turns out to be one of an increasingly ubiquitous series of peripheral characters working for the Brinkmeyers who is a would-be actor: the butler, gardener, footman and chauffeur are all biding their time hoping to be discovered by their movie mogul boss. Well, beats waiting tables, don't it? Even the kidnappers who chloroform and hijack Reggie-as-Joey for a publicity stunt, are wannabe-actors with Hollywood stardust in their eyes:
'But lady, that Roscoe he's got is loaded.'Happy endings all 'round, of course, for Reggie and Joey (put back in their own bodies by circumstances as off-the-cuff and ultimately unimportant as the laughing gas that swapped them in the first place). April June's true colors are revealed (she's a dandy role for Angelina Jolie, now that I think about it) and Reggie finds true love in the arms of helpful and never-wavering Ann, and everyone gets a hot steaming plate of sausages. Happy endings all round, that is, except for the pig. Which ain't a bad average in Hollywood.
'What on Earth did you want with a loaded gun?'
'That's Fred," said Eddie, directing another reproachful glance at him. 'He's so thorough.'
'He likes doing things right,' said George.
'I'm an artist," said Fred defiantly. 'I saw that gun as loaded. That's how I felt it—felt it here,' he said, slapping his chest.
'The fact of the whole matter is,' said George, 'Fred's never been the same man since he was an extra in Lepers of Broadway.'
Me? I've got a trio of different editions of Laughing Gas. I re-read it this past week in a mass market Ballantine Books paperback reprint from 1977 (the golden age of several publishers picking up as many Wodehouse reprints as they could, so that his canon was spread out among dozens of American paperback publishers). It features this cover illustration...
You see, I have kept it from you till now, but there are certain defects in my personal appearance which prevent me being everybody's money where the opposite sex is concerned. Externally, I take after the pater, and you had ever seen the pater you would realize what that means. He was a gallant solider and played a hot game of polo, but he had a face like a gorilla—much more so, indeed, than most gorillas have—and was, so I am informed, affectionately known to his little circle of cronies as Consul, the Almost Human. And I am his living image.I also own the Everyman Library hardcover reissue, and a battered and ex-library but vintage American hardcover edition from Sun Dial Press that's missing its dust jacket but which therefore reveals some lovely wraparound cover art:
These things weigh with girls. They shrink from linking their lot with a fellow whose appearance gives the impression that at any moment he may shin up trees and start throwing coconuts.
A quick glance at a Wodehouse collector's magazine I keep on my shelf alerted me that my poor ex-library edition isn't a first printing, however (it's identical to one but doesn't say first printing; ergo, 'tis not). Just as well. It's a rare and glorious thing to have a lovely edition of a fun and fanciful Wodehouse book, and I'd rather have that than a sackful of filthy lucre, all the tea in China, or even swapping bodies with Mister George Clooney. Well, maybe for just an afternoon. If he's co-starring with Keira Knightley.
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