Wodehouse understood this. ‘Humorists’, he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘are looked down upon by the intelligentsia.’ His work will continue to suffer the fate of so much light comic writing: it will rarely be treated with the seriousness it deserves or the seriousness accorded to many lesser writers. Wodehouse would not be dismayed. For him, the lightness was all.
— Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life
Alan Watts frequently talked about the universe being playful, in the sense that it didn’t exist in order to accomplish a goal or prove a point. Song and dance, for example, likewise exist for their own sake. The “point” of a song isn’t to arrive at the final note; the “point” of a dance isn’t to arrive at a certain spot on the floor. Wodehouse’s writing, to me, is best appreciated as playful in this sense — as a pure delight in the musicality of words, as an appreciation of the inherent silliness of life. His type of silliness is a transcendence of seriousness, not an avoidance of it.