We've had two weeks of Double Dactyls, and I'm not really feeling the Lascivious Limericks thing today. Writing a dirty limerick always makes me feel uncomfortably as though I might be turning into Isaac Asimov, which then sends me running to the mirror to make sure I have not sprouted a pair of large, tufty, grizzled eyebrows that waggle up and down like Groucho's above a pair of Geeky Black Horn-rims (not to speak of the equally grizzled mutton-chop facial hair, which is just unspeakably bad.) So - in the interest of keeping me out of the laser hair removal spa, we will eschew limericks for the day.
How, then, shall we indulge in our Weekly Wickedness?
Sheer alliteration made me think that perhaps I'd write a little disquisition on Wit. I have, of course, numerous favorite examples of the witty riposte, and can quote them on the instant, given a momentary conversational pause while you are drawing in your breath to say, "Please don't."
But what is wit? (Do not, at your peril, come back at me with, "I dunno. Whut's wit choo?") What constitutes the difference between the flash of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's rapier - when asked with a leer by George Bernard Shaw what her new husband was like, Mrs. Pat serenely retorted, "Six foot four, and everything in proportion" - and the clumsy cudgel of your Uncle Melvin, who thinks he's slaying them when he gets drunk at the rehearsal dinner and loudly demands that the waitress, to whose person he has already attempted to administer a surreptitious pinch, fetch him a "honeymoon salad. Know what that is? Lettuce alone, without dressing!"?
Of all the definitions I've encountered, none has ever seemed to sum it up as well as dear Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism:
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
As shades more sweetly recommend the light,
So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.
"What of was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" - well, there you have it.
I thought I would have a private little Googlefest to see whether I could find a website that would teach everyone how to be witty, so that our future conversations would be delightful fun in the style of the Algonquin Round Table, and all I would have to do from now on, in order to write one hit screenplay after another, would be to invite people over and turn on the tape recorder, later transcribing everything onto my laptop once everyone had gone home and the dishes were in the dishwasher. But this plan hit a snag, for I came across a website with the promising title:
"How To Have A Witty Conversation."
http://www.wikihow.com/Have-a-Witty-Conversation
This site provides seven simple steps that are supposed to turn you into a twenty-first century edition of Dorothy Parker. Bizarrely, immediately after Step One: "Listen Well," there is an ad in the exact same font as the rest of the Witty Advice, admonishing you, "Don't File Bankruptcy," and for a second I thought that was Step Two. Which actually wouldn't have been too bad, since there is nothing particularly witty about filing for bankruptcy, unless you can toss off some clever remark, as you climb to the roof of your building, about how it's raining hedge fund managers because Black Monday is here again.
But then I scrolled down and discovered the real Step Two, "Use Creative and Vivid Exaggeration." There is a picture of a girl in a purple shirt who is crossing her eyes and pointing at her nose with both forefingers. Which is mystifying, until you read the example of the bon mot that has just supposedly been uttered:
Let's say your friend is telling you how cross-eyed his teacher is. You can say, in response, "She's so cross-eyed that when she cries, the tears run down her back!"
I almost didn't have the heart to read on, but the horrid fascination that makes me draw closer to that thing on the pavement the dog is straining towards, to see whether or not it really is squashed rat (invariably, it is), made me go on to Step Three: "Use Puns."
Let's take the example from the previous step: "...the tears run down her back." If you're feeling witty, and there happens to be a stethoscope laying around, because you always carry around a stethoscope with you, hold it up mimicking a doctor and say "Evidently a case of bacteria!"
If you have to say "get it... back-tear-ia?" then you need to work on your delivery.
As if that were not enough, I was advised to pillage the works of Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, and old M*A*S*H* episodes for delectable plays on words with which I would bludgeon my family and friends about the ears, like a Ritalin-crazed jester with an inflated pig's bladder. Obviously, the shtick with the stethoscope is going to be easier to pull off if you're quoting Hawkeye and Trapper John.
Now we come to Step Four: "Use Metaphors!"
Let's say someone says, out of the blue, "It's 6 o'clock!" You can say "Thank you, Big Ben!" ("Big Ben" is a nickname for a giant bell in a clock in London.) This is a particularly sarcastic example, because you're also implying (by saying "thank you") that you're obviously not thankful!
At this point, I became so discouraged by the knowledge that the writer of this article is convinced that it is necessary to tell Aspiring Wits like me that Big Ben is giant bell on a large municipal clock in London (that's the London that's in England that's in Europe, f.y.i.) that it struck me, much in the way that Big Ben strikes the hour (in 1949,the clock slowed by four and a half minutes after a flock of starlings perched on the minute hand - a witty allusion, on the part of the starlings, to Sir Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey - "I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity. 'I can't get out,' said the starling"), that I am never, no, never, going to be witty in the manner outlined by this writer, that I decided I might as well stop right now and go do something useful, like tat some lace.
As John Donne, the metaphysical poet, sermonist, and subject of the play Wit observed, "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. "
Gentle Reader - if the clod who wrote "How to Have a Witty Conversation" be washed away by the sea, those bells are gonna be pealing, not tolling.
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