Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!
Read in Blandings Castle and Elsewhere.
On screen
These episodes adapt this work or stories collected here. Television scripts may combine sources and change characters, settings or incidents; the linked guide gives the evidence and distinctions.
- Blandings — Series 1, episode 1: “Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!”
Draws on “Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!”.
A very serious problem about a pig
Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey! begins from a crisis that is entirely serious to Lord Emsworth: the Empress of Blandings has stopped eating. Her keeper, George Cyril Wellbeloved, is unavailable after getting into trouble, and the interruption to the pig's routine threatens the achievement on which Emsworth has set his heart. The story appears in Blandings Castle and Elsewhere and is an excellent introduction to the disproportionate emotional importance that an animal can acquire in this world.
The joke works best if readers accept that importance rather than dismissing it. Emsworth's concern is comic because it absorbs him so completely, but it is also recognizable. People routinely attach enormous significance to competitions, gardens, collections and pets. Wodehouse changes the scale and the object of devotion, then lets the surrounding social arrangements respond. The result is a story whose immediate problem is agricultural but whose real material includes authority, pride, love and the difficulty of asking for help.
The title is an action
The title looks like an interruption to ordinary language, and that is precisely its function. The call is not decorative atmosphere. It becomes a form of practical knowledge whose proper use can alter the situation. Reading silently, it is worth noticing how the stretched syllables oblige the eye to linger. The printed word asks to be heard, and its shape hints at the physical effort of producing it.
James Belford's ability to make the appropriate call supplies a striking contrast with the formal language of a country-house family. The person who can perform an apparently ridiculous sound may be more useful than those who command the house. This reversal gives the story a satisfying clarity. Expertise is demonstrated through a result, not announced by a title. Emsworth's world becomes temporarily reorganized around someone who knows how to do the particular thing that matters.
The Empress and the limits of rank
A pig does not respond to the social arguments that influence human characters. She cannot be impressed into appetite by family precedence or a polished explanation. That indifference is a powerful comic resource. It exposes the difference between possessing authority over an estate and being able to make events within it proceed as desired. Emsworth may own the Empress, but ownership does not supply every necessary skill.
The missing keeper is important for the same reason. Routine labour can become invisible when it is performed successfully. Once the routine breaks, the household discovers how much depends on particular knowledge and familiarity. This reading does not require turning the story into a treatise on employment. It simply takes its practical situation seriously. The pig's needs reveal that the functioning of Blandings rests on more than aristocratic wishes. A useful question is which kinds of competence the family notices only when they are no longer readily available.
An inappropriate sound in a respectable room
The club episode places Emsworth's urgent agricultural concern in surroundings governed by entirely different expectations. A dining room can tolerate conversation, but a full-hearted pig call is another matter. Wodehouse obtains comedy by bringing together two internally sensible worlds: the world in which feeding the Empress is the overriding task, and the world in which lunch ought to remain quiet and dignified.
Neither setting needs to become unreal for the encounter to be absurd. What changes is Emsworth's ability to remember which set of expectations currently applies. His absorption carries Blandings into London with him. This is a characteristic strength of the character: he is often described as vague, yet he can be intensely focused on a chosen object. The apparent contradiction is useful. His failures of general attention and his fierce attention to the Empress are two aspects of the same comic temperament, not simply incompatible traits.
Courtship meets useful knowledge
The romantic element gives Belford's expertise consequences beyond the feeding problem. When a family evaluates a possible match, it may emphasize manners, position or its own existing objections. The pig crisis introduces another test: can this person actually help? That alteration in the terms of judgment is part of the story's pleasure. What had seemed an irrelevant accomplishment becomes decisive within a very particular set of circumstances.
Readers should nevertheless keep the comic scale in view. A successful pig call does not amount to a universal theory of marriage. Its force comes from the concentration of Emsworth's attention. For him, the ability addresses an immediate and consuming need. Wodehouse lets that need rearrange other priorities. The mechanism is elegant because the animal plot and the romance do not merely alternate; one supplies the leverage that changes the other. Removing either would make the resolution much less satisfying.
How to read this Blandings introduction
This story is particularly rewarding aloud, because the title and the reactions around it have an obvious vocal dimension. An actor need not imitate any television performance to make the contrast work. A restrained account of respectable disapproval followed by an expansive call already supplies the essential change of scale. On the page, the surrounding prose does the equivalent work by carefully preparing a dignified atmosphere for disruption.
Pair it with Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend, from the same collection. Both stories place Emsworth's private preferences against the demands of other people, but the later comparison reveals different emotional possibilities. Here an animal's appetite organizes the crisis; there an encounter with a child helps him reconsider his own freedom. Together they make a useful correction to the idea that Blandings offers only interchangeable pig jokes. The repeated setting supports distinct conflicts, and Emsworth's apparently narrow interests can open unexpectedly generous routes through them.
Collection contents and editions: Blandings Castle and Elsewhere