A comic effect is created by the incongruous combination of formal and informal language in Wodehouse's narrative passages, as in the beginning of the novel: "Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French." Before the first comma, the passage may be the beginning of a serious novel, but the sudden use of two colloquial words, "shifty" and "hangdog", prepares the reader for the semantic incongruity of the last part of the sentence.Hall (1974), p. 90–91.
