Censoring the humorists

The censorship is everywhere, and now it’s P G Wodehouse’s turn.  From Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag:

. . . now, it’s Wooster and Jeeves up in front of the woke firing squad, and that seems somehow appropriate. When censors come after humorists, it’s a kind of validation of the subject and a special kind of indictment of the censors.

Penguin Random House has altered what it termed the “unacceptable prose” of author P.G. Wodehouse in new editions of his classic Jeeves and Wooster series.

The publisher also warned readers of “outdated” terms in the revamped works, the Sunday Telegraph reports.

The Jeeves and Wooster books portray Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves, and consist of 35 short stories and 11 novels.

A disclaimer printed on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Wodehouse’s Thank you, Jeeves, notes, “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterizations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”

“That we regard as unacceptable.”

They could just give up the books and let someone else publish them, if they morally object to them, instead they’ve gone to censorship route. . . .

Read the rest here.  Censoring a classic, whether Wodehouse’s short stories or Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, on the basis that a reader “may find [the content] outdated” insults both the author and the reader. (BTW, this blog highly recommends The Code of the Woosters, pictured above.)

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