Wit, Wisdom, Wisecracks

Some blogs have wit. Pretty many have wisecracks. A few have wisdom.

Wit is a rare and brilliant form of humor. It's sharp and precise and pitiless. Wisecracks and one-liners are seductive, but lesser forms of wit in my opinion. It's hard to be a wit. It's easier to crack wise.

Witticisms are remembered and quoted. Wisecracks are soon forgotten. I'm pretty much a wisecracker myself. Some of my favorite humorists are both wits and wisecrackers. Like Oscar Wilde.

When Oscar said, "I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent invitation," he was wisecracking. But when he said that a murderer was "One presumed to be innocent until declared insane," he was using wit. Satire is almost always wit. I love satire. When he said, "Never buy anything simply because it is expensive," I not sure which he was using. But I'd say it was just a wisecrack. That Oscar.

I think these are wisecracks:

· Never slap a man in the face if he's chewing tobacco. (Abe Martin)
· Men aren't attracted to me by my mind, but what I don't mind. (Gypsy Rose Lee)
· I can't remember your name, but don't tell me. (A. Woollcott)
· Always look a gift horse in the mouth.
· I put instant coffee in a microwave and almost went back in time. (Steven Wright)
· If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. (G. K. Chesterton I think, but Gypsy Rose Lee does better with this one.)
· If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly…very slowly. (GRL)

But what are these?

· Her face was her chaperone. (Rupert Hughes)
· No man is lonely while eating spaghetti; it takes too much attention. (Chris Morley)
· I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens. (Woody Allen)

I consider these puns:

· Occasionally he takes an alcoholic day. (Oscar Wilde)
· My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle. (Henny Youngman)
· I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. It finally dawned on me. (Dunno who)
· Beauty is only sin deep. (H.H. Munro)
· I tried to snort coke once, but I got an ice cube stuck up my nose.
· Artificial insemination: Copulation without representation. (Playboy)

I think these are wit:

· You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. (Al Capone)
· She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon. (Groucho Marx)
· I am in the prime of senility. (Benjamin Franklin)
· Familiarity breeds contempt – and children. (Mark Twain)
· Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. (Socrates. Oh, yes. Socrates! Didn't guess that, didcha?)
· Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped. (Sam Levenson)
· I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. (Woody Allen)
· Better a witty fool than a foolish wit. (Shakespeare)
· Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him. (Mark Twain)

No Ambrose Bierce ? Ambrose belongs to Doug. He's good with him.

Of course there are malapropisms. Samuel Goldwyn was good at those. He said things like:
· I don't pay any attention to him. I don't even ignore him.
· What do you mean the story is too caustic? Who cares about expense?
And Yogi Berra was a pro with, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." And "You can observe a lot just by watching." That Yogi.

But what about Funny? Funny is different to each of us. Some of these are funny to some of us:

· My mother buried three husbands, and two of them were just napping.
(Rita Rudner)
· I don't intend for this to take on a political tone. I'm just here for the drugs.
(Nancy Reagan, former First Lady. Oh, yes she did! Check it out.)
· USA Today has come out with a new survey: Apparently three out of four people make up 75 percent of the population. (David Letterman)
· Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. (Albert Einstein)
· If you lived in your car, you'd be home by now. (Bumper sticker)
· There will always be death and taxes; however, death doesn't get worse every year.

This is way too long. And I didn't put in anything wise. So here's just one that I think is wise:

· If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call to make, whom would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
- Stephen Levine

Well? Why are you?