»Laughing Gas and A Gentleman of Leisure

I had ordered a copy of the newest hardback reprint of A Gentleman of Leisure, ostensibly to replace the paperback I bought at Grand Central many, many years ago -- on my first (or second?) visit through New York City. It may well have been the first time I read Wodehouse on my own: my parents avidly read his novels, and took Jeeves and Blandings books on family trips, from which they sometimes read aloud, but I had not read any of his books in high school. I preferred Kerouac and Burroughs and Artaud.
Laughing Gas I just picked up at a rummage sale in Howth.
A Gentleman of Leisure and Laughing Gas are both hilarious, and both are set in Wodehouse's adoptive United States. The action in Laughing Gas is almost entirely in Hollywood, which forms the slapstick backdrop for this novel and also for Evelyn Waugh's deliciously funny "The Loved One": Hollwood in the '30s was so chock-a-block with expatriates, it seems, that you could hardly swing a cat without beaning a half-dozen monocled, bowler-hatted gentlemen.

A Gentleman of Leisure has a sublime plot, although it superficially resembles many of Wodehouse's comic romances. Our protagonist seeks to win the hand of a woman he has only seen across the rail between first- and second-class accomodations in trans-Atlantic passage, and also to settle a dilettante bet about his capability for larceny.