Under the Influence of Laughing Gas by CURTIS ARMSTRONG
The quarterly journal of The Wodehouse Society Volume 27 Number 1 Spring 2006 Under the Influence of Laughing Gas BY CURTIS ARMSTRONG Not only a phenomenal talent of the Silver Screen, but a topping inside-Hollywood historian, Curtis gave this talk at the Hooray for Hollywood convention in Los Angeles, August 2005. Serial mayhem, drug use, alcoholism, alcohol and tobacco abuse by minors, violation of child-labor laws, child abandonment and endangerment, kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, juvenile delinquency, child-on- child violence, unwanted sexual contact. ollywood is responsible for much of what we see on television Hand in films. It is attacked like clockwork by the arbiters of public morals for corrupting American youth, inciting violence, diminishing attention spans, dumbing down our intellects, and encouraging the violent overthrow of our duly elected government—when we have one. Our seasonal earthquakes, floods, fires, and mudslides are considered a righteous judgment on a modern-day Cities of the Plain. As Wodehouse himself might put it, it’s the kind of city that makes one wonder whether man is really God’s last word. Let’s face it, as far as many Americans are concerned, Hollywood might as well be France. Curtis Armstong makes merry with wine rather than But the litany of violence and corruption I have listed above laughing gas, while sporting a classy Drones Club tie! comes not from the latest hit series or erotic thriller, but from P. G. Wodehouse’s 1936 novel Laughing Gas. “Ah, Hollywood, Hollywood! Bright city of sorrows, where fame deceives and temptation lurks, where souls are shriveled in the furnace of desire, whose streets are bathed with the shamed tears of betrayed maidens! Hollywood! Home of mean glories and spangled wretchedness, where the deathless fire burns for the outstretched wings of the guileless moth and beauty is broken on sin’s cruel wheel.” Theodore Dreiser? No, it is P.
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