He was inspired by none other than one of the greatest detectives ever and named after a great sportsman and later on went on to become the inspiration for a search engine name!
He was also inspired by the author’s own valet!
As far as Valets go, the most famous before Batman’s Valet AKA Alfred was most definitely JEEVES!
Jeeves was your go to guy for any problems in life!
By the way be informed that Jeeves is a valet, not a butler; that is, he is responsible for serving an individual, whereas a butler is responsible for a household and manages other servants!
On rare occasions he does fill in for someone else’s butler. According to Bertie Wooster (his ‘master’), he “can buttle with the best of them”.
Those were the times of the rich and the high society (read white!); and to have some other guy as your manservant may be considered well, in my daughter’s words; cringe!
Then again the stories also used to show how the Valet was much clever and better and well informed than the ‘master’!
If you take out the obvious racism; they were a great read specially when you wanted a quick laugh! The Jeeves one liners are among the best and funniest one liners ever!
If you liked such novels then a serious version could be The Remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Here also you actually have ‘masters’ who try to show off their respective ‘valets’ or ‘Butlers’! On how knowledgeable they were or how well read they were!
If treated with good pay and respect then it is more of less the job of a wise counsel!
The most important thing was that you could ask Jeeves anything! And he will not judge you (at least not openly!) and try to answer your questions (no matter how dumb they were!!) in the best possible way possible!
Which is probably why one of the best search engines of the past was called ASK JEEVES! Of course it could not handle the Google tsunami! No search engine can actually come close to Google since it already has a huge search database and well, experience! Then again even Nokia fell!
“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?'”
“The mood will pass, sir.”!
That was one of my favourite ones!
Mentioning Butler or Valet and Jeeves and Batman; you must remember Val Kilmer aka ICEMAN! All said and done, he was actually right when he said that Maverick is well, Maverick!
Of course he was super cool in Batman and the Saint…Val Edward Kilmer you will be missed.
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