A favourite Pope was 17th-century English satirist Alexander (Pope), he who defined “true wit” as “nature to advantage dress’d/What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”.
The sense is not just put well, but is also enhanced. As in Groucho Marx’s comment, “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.” Or film star Mae West’s comment on a rival, “His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”
Or Muhammad Ali’s taunting comment about boxer Joe Frazier: “He’s so ugly, when he cries the tears turn around and go down the back of his head.”
Pithy is just not enough to make wit great, it must also advance the meaning of a sentence.
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Is that clear, class?
I’ve a weakness for the good political retort. As when famously reserved 30th US president Calvin Coolidge was challenged by a woman who bet she could get him say more than two words. He replied: “You lose.” On his death, Dorothy Parker quipped: “How can they tell?”
US second president John Adams remarked that “one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress”. Not much change there. Then it was Winston Churchill who said “Americans will always try to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”
As now, other US presidents had a problem with Canadians. Then Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau was described by 37th US President Richard Nixon as a: “...son of a bitch and asshole”. Trudeau responded: “I’ve been called worse things by better people.”
Napoleon said that “in politics, stupidity is not a handicap”. Ah, now! The more things change the more they remain the same. It is to be reminded of Mahatma Gandi’s response when asked what he thought of western civilisation. He said: “I think it would be a good idea.”
Where the current US president is concerned, within his Republican Party it is probably as Oscar Wilde observed of a rival, that “he has no enemies but is intensely disliked by his friends”.
When the end comes, as it surely must, some may reach for Mark Twain’s quip, that: “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a note saying I approved of it.”
Wit, from Old English wit, for “quickness of intellect in speech or writing”.
