Comic techniques in the prose of P.G. Wodehouse

Despite being widely recognised as perhaps the greatest humorous novelist in the English language, and frequently also simply as a great creative genius (Hilaire Belloc called Wodehouse “the best living writer of English”), as Golab notes, “little evidence has been shown to justify this claim”, there is almost no literature “attempting to specify the reasons for Wodehouse’s success as a humorous writer” (2004: 35). There have been precious few linguistic-stylistic studies of Wodehouse’s works and certainly none which incorporate corpus-assisted analysis.