Life & Wisdom Quote by P. G. Wodehouse

A dry martini is an absurdly elegant yardstick for terror, which is exactly why it lands. Wodehouse takes a stock description of fear - pale, trembling - and reroutes it through cocktail culture, turning physiology into social satire. "White and shaken" works as a punchline because it’s both clinically apt and ridiculously posh: the body behaves like a drink ordered by people who consider panic impolite but appreciate a good garnish.

The line carries a double charge. On the surface, it’s a crisp simile: whiteness as pallor, shaking as tremor. Underneath, it’s a joke about class performance. A martini implies clubs, drawing rooms, a world where alcohol is a ritual and emotion is something you manage with style. By comparing a frightened man to a cocktail, Wodehouse suggests the character is less a suffering soul than a social object - a member of a milieu where even fear arrives in well-known recipes.

It also showcases Wodehouse’s signature kindness-to-cruelty ratio: he punctures without poisoning. The image humiliates the character, but lightly, like a sideways glance rather than a public sentence. Contextually, it belongs to an era when the martini was shorthand for urbane modernity and brittle sophistication; Wodehouse repurposes that shorthand to show how quickly sophistication curdles into farce. The wit isn’t just decorative - it’s a worldview: the world is ridiculous, and the best response is a perfectly timed comparison.