Laughing Gas: Summary & Reading Guide

An earl and a child star swap the lives they thought they wanted

Reginald, third Earl of Havershot, visits Hollywood on an errand concerning his cousin. Joey Cooley is a child film star whose golden curls have made him an idol to the public and a lucrative concern to the adults who manage him. They meet at a dentist’s office while both are under anaesthetic, and their identities appear to exchange. Joey finds himself in the body of a six-foot aristocrat with a boxing Blue; Reggie must live as a small, carefully controlled celebrity. The odd premise gives Wodehouse a way to test what each thinks the other’s freedom is worth.

Joey’s position is less enviable than his public image. Agents, directors and other adults exercise power over his schedule and behaviour. He would like to escape the machinery and return to Ohio, and an adult body promises the ability to confront people who have been ordering him about. Yet the sudden change of appearance does not supply a guide to how an earl is expected to behave. His opportunities are comic partly because a child’s impatience is being expressed through a figure whom strangers read as an English gentleman. The social costume has changed faster than the mind wearing it.

Reggie’s predicament is the inverse and, to my mind, the richest part of the joke. A man accustomed to physical confidence discovers the small size and restricted choices of a child star. Miss Brinkmeyer and the boys around Joey have reasons to treat him according to the role they know, whatever he remembers of his earlier life. He cannot simply announce that he is an earl and expect the film business to recognize him. The danger of kidnapping gives his situation an urgency beyond embarrassment. Wodehouse turns the exchange into two simultaneous adventures, each puncturing the other’s fantasy of escape.

The Hollywood setting matters because it already manufactures identities for public consumption. Joey’s curls and expression have an economic value that says little about his actual temperament. Reggie’s title is a social label of another kind, with expectations attached even before he speaks. By placing the exchange within the movie industry, Wodehouse can ask how far either person is allowed to be different from the image strangers have purchased. The question remains playful; this is an extravagant farce, not a solemn treatise on childhood work or aristocratic privilege. Its observation of those pressures gives the absurdity a firm footing.

Laughing Gas first appeared as a shorter novelette in This Week in 1935, with a British Pearson’s serial that year. The book text is considerably longer. Herbert Jenkins issued the UK book on 25 September 1936, and Doubleday, Doran followed in America on 19 November. A serial encounter and a book reading therefore represent different lengths of the work. For a first visit, choose a full book edition, and do not assume that an excerpt of the novelette contains every scene recalled by someone who read the later novel. The bibliography makes the development of the text unusually clear.

The premise recalls the title question of If I Were You, but that 1931 novel turns on an alleged switch at birth and class position. Here an anaesthetic brings about an apparent exchange of consciousness between an adult and a child. The two stories should not be merged simply because both play with identity. Their settings, stakes and kinds of misunderstanding differ. I would read them side by side for the contrast: one lets a family renegotiate a hereditary title, and the other makes a movie star’s managed childhood collide with a titled visitor’s expectations.

There is a particular Wodehouse delight in watching characters reason from incomplete but confident evidence. Nobody around Joey’s small body knows Reggie’s predicament, so an entirely reasonable reaction to the visible boy can be hilariously wrong about the person inside. Joey’s adult appearance lets him make demands that would have been ignored a day earlier. The reader occupies the privileged position of knowing both sides. That double view makes even a straightforward conversation lively, because the words, voice, body and listener’s assumption may all point in different directions.

Choose Laughing Gas when you want one of Wodehouse’s more fanciful premises and a visit to Hollywood without the Anglers’ Rest or Blandings Castle. It is a self-contained identity farce with the unnerving practical question of how to return to one’s own life. I return for Joey’s refusal to behave like the angelic image sold to his audience, and for Reggie’s education in the limits of a child star’s apparent privileges. The longer novel has room to make both halves of the exchange count before the adventure finds its way home.

The exchange also sharpens a familiar wish to be taken seriously. Joey imagines adulthood as permission to speak plainly to those who control him. Reggie discovers that nobody treats the small star as an independent adult, however sensible his argument may sound to himself. Their frustrations are different, yet the swapped vantage points make them legible to one another and to the reader. The novel’s fantasy is funniest when it exposes such ordinary failures of listening.