The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [105]
This plot appeared, with slight variation, in the most popular of the Marx Brothers films, A Night at The Opera (1935). Groucho, as the supposedly well-connected Otis B. Driftwood, is trying to get the rich and gullible older woman Mrs Claypool (played by Margaret Dumont) into society. The ambitious Hermann Gottlieb who runs the New York Opera Company, greedy for her money, suggests that if she would pay 1000 dollars a night, they could hire the world's greatest tenor, Rodolphe Laspari. Groucho goes over to Europe to hire him, and Laspari turns out to be the chief dark figure of the story: arrogant, rude and condescending. They sail for New York on a luxury liner, with Laspari's leading lady, the heroine Rosa; while in an `inferior realm' below decks as stowaways are Chico, Harpo and the hero Ricardo, also a tenor, with whom Rosa is in love. The stowaways manage to land by disguising themselves in beards as `heroic foreign aviators, then go into hiding. When rehearsals begin Rosa is sacked, for failing to respond on stage to Laspari because he is so arrogant and unpleasant. The brothers scheme to ensure that the opera's first night is a shambles, as from behind the scenes they arrange that the scenery from several different operas should whizz on and off in bewildering array. Laspari is booed off the stage and Gottlieb is at his wits end; until Ricardo and Rosa emerge from the shadows to sing like angels and save the day. Their performance is wildly acclaimed. They are hired and can get married.
The love interest tended to play a similarly subordinate role in that other celebrated twentieth-century vehicle for so many of the traditional devices of Comedy, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse (who also, in his youth, wrote a number of American musicals). Nevertheless it is still usually there to play a crucial role in shaping the plot, as in Leave it to Psmith (1923). The hero has fallen in love with a girl who has just got a job cataloguing the library at Blandings Castle, the seat of the Earl of Emsworth. By improbably disguising himself as a Canadian poet, he himself wins an invitation to stay at the castle. Most of the fun-and games of the story then centres on the way the pair manage to outwit a hapless pair of disguised international jewel thieves who are trying to steal Lady Constance's diamond necklace. By the end of a sequence of entirely familiar Comedy situations, the dark figures have been exposed, all lost objects have been found (including the stolen necklace and the noble Earl's glasses) and the hero has re-emerged in his true identity to claim the heroine. But it cannot be said that the love interest serves any real purpose other than to lend theme to a hilarious farce; and this is even truer of most of the tales involving the silly-ass Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves, with the Lady Bracknell-like figure of Aunt Agatha invariably hovering disapprovingly in the background.
In the English-speaking world Jeeves has become the most famous servant in the history of Comedy. His role is the entirely familiar one of the socially 'inferior' figure who eventually redeems the disorder which is afflicting the `upper world'. In The Inimitable Jeeves (1924), Wooster's friend Bingo Little, whose weakness is constantly falling romantically in love, develops an overwhelming passion for a humble teashop waitress. As usual, he immediately wishes to marry her; but the obstacle in the way is his rich and stuffy uncle, the source of Bingo's allowance, who will certainly oppose such a socially unsuitable match in the role of 'unrelenting parent' and thus deny Bingo his only means of income. Jeeves conceives a plan whereby Bingo will introduce his uncle to the works of an authoress named Rosie M. Banks, who specialises in sentimental romances in which girls of lowly origin marry men of superior station. Like most of Jeeves's schemes, it works like a treat, even to the point where Bertie is sent round to plead Bingo's case for getting married, implausibly impersonating Rosie M. Banks (Bingo has explained to his uncle that Wooster