The sorting got harder as I went. A line about a bad marriage and a line about a losing political campaign are, structurally, making the same joke -- something meant to work out did not, and here we are, laughing about it instead of crying (Mel Brooks noted that “tragedy is if I cut my finger. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die”). Watch out

!

Human Nature, Examined

Not psychology exactly, though a couple of these writers would have made fine psychologists. Just a set of close, slightly unflattering observations about how people behave, as opposed to how they’d describe their own behavior.

“A great many people fall in love with or feel attracted to a person who offers the least possibility of a harmonious union.” -- Rudolf Dreikers

“Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.” -- William Dean Howells

“Everybody was up to something, especially, of course, those who were up to nothing.” -- Noël Coward

“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.” -- Alan Bennett

“Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that’s not true. Some smaller countries are neutral.” -- Robert Orben

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” -- James Branch Cabell

“Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.” -- Sam Levenson

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.” -- Ellen DeGeneres

“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I’ve seen.” -- Benjamin Disraeli

Politics, War, and Other Blood Sports

A short section, but a dense one -- these five cover a gaffe, a draft dodge, a courtroom, a scandal, and a cocktail party, which between them is most of what politics actually consists of.

“[It’s] time for the human race to enter the solar system.” -- Dan Quayle

“I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife’s brother.” -- Artemus Ward

“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.” -- Groucho Marx

“This is the biggest fuss over nothing since the last fuss over nothing.” -- Alastair Campbell

“Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything.” -- Herb Caen

On Failure, Self-Doubt, and Getting By

The oldest trick in comedy is complaining about yourself before anyone else gets the chance. These writers all take the trick to its logical, cheerfully bleak conclusion.

“Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” -- Peter De Vries

“Everybody hates me because I’m so universally liked.” -- Peter de Vries

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong?’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’” -- Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown in Peanuts

“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and, doggone it, people like me.” -- Stuart Smalley

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.” -- Woody Allen

“There are three rules for writing a successful first novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” – Multiple Attributions (the setup has been used for ending a recession or negotiating a border dispute, among others)

“I don’t have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.” -- Ashleigh Brilliant

“It is bad luck to be superstitious.” -- Andrew W. Mathis

Show Business & the Arts

A small closing set on the industries built entirely around telling people what to feel -- and the writers who noticed the machinery didn’t always work as advertised.

“My son said: ‘If you go to an actor’s house, there’s a picture of the actor and other actors. If you go to a producer’s house, there are Picassos. I think I’ll be a producer.’” -- Burt Reynolds

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” -- Hunter S. Thompson

“A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.” -- Roald Dahl, Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“With Epcot Center, the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn’t think possible in today’s world. They have created a land of make-believe that’s worse than regular life.” -- P.J. O’Rourke

That closes out the Random folder -- fifty-three lines, seven categories, one computer file now a little neater. Now, on to that tragedy in the kitchen.

It soon grew into a repository for things of questionable origin (random medals, a cloth tape measure, directions for new kitchen devices, a ruler, chopsticks, batteries of different sizes, assorted buttons we could never match with the original piece of clothing, and extra keys). This sets the stage for introducing my one-liner junk drawer.

The quips, jokes, commentary, and other bright lines that caught my attention over the decades didn’t always fit neatly into a category such as advertising, computers, politics, or wine. I started a desk file folder called Random when it wasn’t easy to assign something anywhere else. In the digital era, it grew into a folder on my hard drive

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I have tried, more than once, to retire the folder entirely, to force every stray joke into a tidier home. It never works. Some lines exist only to be funny, and we all do need a little randomness in our lives.

So here is the first of two collections of refugees from the folder: twenty-six lines that earned their keep on wit alone, sorted -- as much as anything in a junk drawer can be sorted -- into three loose piles. First, the wordsmiths who build a joke the way an engineer builds a bridge, out of pure structural logic. Second, the professionals of the put-down, several of them speaking from a stage with a heckler somewhere below. And third, the people who looked at modern convenience and found it, on balance, a little absurd. A second column, coming next week, empties the last 27 lines.

I. Wordplay & Deadpan Logic

These are jokes built like little machines -- pull the lever at the start, and the punchline arrives.

“Fig Newton: The force required to accelerate a fig 39.37 inches/sec.” -- J. Hart

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.” -- Henry J. Tillman

“There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on.” -- Robert Byrne

“The trouble with being punctual is that nobody’s there to appreciate it.” -- Franklin P. Jones

“If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” -- Lawrence J. Peter

“The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.” -- Walter Bagehot

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.” -- Robert Frost

“I’m going to memorize your name and throw my head away.” -- Oscar Levant

“Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?” -- Woody Allen

“The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep.” -- Woody Allen

“I am at two with nature.” -- Woody Allen

II. The Fine Art of the Put-Down

Some of these were fired at a specific, deserving target -- a heckler, a Texan, a man who mistook confidence for competence. Others are put-downs with no named recipient, which is arguably more efficient: everyone gets to imagine their own.

“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” -- Groucho Marx

“You’re a good example of why some animals eat their young.” -- Jim Samuels, to a heckler

“When your IQ rises to 28, sell.” -- Professor Irwin Corey, to a heckler

“What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.” -- Oscar Levant

“Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.” -- Alexandre Dumas

“The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.” -- Harlan Ellison

“His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.” -- Woody Allen

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days, no one could stand him.” -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

III. Modern Inconveniences

Progress, these writers agree, has a way of solving one problem and quietly introducing three more. Filed here: technology, home economics, and the interstate highway system, all found wanting.

“I have not lost my mind - it’s backed up on disk somewhere.” -- Unknown

“We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police.” -- Jeff Marder

“Thanks to the Interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.” -- Charles Kuralt

“My wife uses fabric softener. I never knew what that stuff was for. Then I noticed women coming up to me, sniffing, then saying under their breath, “Married!” and walking away. Fabric Softeners are how our wives mark their territory. We can take off the ring, but it’s hard to get that April fresh scent out of your clothes.” -- Andy Rooney

“Health food makes me sick.” -- Calvin Trillin

“I don’t have a bank account, because I don’t know my mother’s maiden name.” -- Paula Poundstone

“Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together....” -- Carl Zwanzig

The last twenty-seven lines in the folder cover love, war, failure, and the entertainment industry, which is to say, everything the first three piles left out. Human nature doesn’t sort itself as neatly as logic and put-downs do, so please forgive the randomness and submit any of your favorite additions in the comments.

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THE SATIRISTS AND PERFORMERS

The performance-built philosophical zinger — the monologue, the beat poem, the stand-up bit — adds a different dynamic from the printed selections.

1. Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.

— Tim Minchin, “Storm” (2009)

A dinner-party rant turned beat poem.

2. I don’t go in for ancient wisdom — I don’t believe just ’cos ideas are tenacious it means they’re worthy.

— Tim Minchin, “Storm” (2009)

A direct challenge to half the quotes in this collection’s companion volume.

3. Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby.

— Ricky Gervais, English comedian, actor, writer, producer and director, best known for co-creating, co-writing, and starring in the British television sitcom, The Office.

His analogy ends an argument by making the other side laugh first.

4. Science seeks the truth, and it does not discriminate. It’s humble — it knows what it knows, and it knows what it doesn’t know… It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition.

— Ricky Gervais, “Does God Exist? Ricky Gervais Takes Your Questions,” Wall Street Journal blog

Humility and knowing what one doesn’t know get one thinking.

5. If you took every religious book ever written and destroyed them, in a thousand years they’d either never come back or come back completely different. If you did the same to every science book, they’d come back exactly the same — because the tests would turn out the same.

— Ricky Gervais

More intellectual and humorous jujitsu.

THE PAGE-BOUND WITS (1975–2000)

Before the monologue took over, the big questions got punctured in comic strips, glossaries, and mock field logs.

1. I wonder where we go when we die? … Pittsburgh?

— Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson (cartoons from 1985–1995)

The biggest question in Western metaphysics, punctured by geography.

2. Historical Overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

Written before cable news went 24 hours, let alone before digital phones.

3. McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

The rare glossary entry that escaped his book and made it into the dictionary.

4. This does not mean you are ‘losing it,’ or are ‘not playing with a full deck,’ or are ‘not all there,’ or that you’re ‘eating with the dirigibles’… or any of the other demeaning epithets said about people who are peeling an empty banana.

— Steve Martin, “Wittgenstein’s Banana,” Pure Drivel (1998)

A philosopher’s name borrowed to dignify total nonsense — which is, itself, a small philosophical point may catch the attention of physicists pondering Schrödinger’s Cat.

5. With the exception of the parsing, all behavior is typical of Earth kitten behavior. The parsing activity, which was done with a small ball-point pen, was an anomaly.

— Steve Martin, Pure Drivel (1998)

A satire of the deadpan authority of the research report.

THE MILLENNIAL FRAGMENT

Where Coupland got a glossary, this generation got scattered aphorisms and single coinages.

1. A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

— Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)

Ancient wisdom, smuggled into a novel about a marriage falling apart by this American writer.

2. The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

— Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)

A dark-humor twist to always looking on the bright side of life.

3. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

— Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

A bleak little aphorism, from the American writer who created a mythical “X-Ville” as a place where things mostly go wrong.

4. Are we in hell? The people of the portal ask themselves. Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?

— Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (2021)

This American poet got her start by creating “sext poems” on Twitter and other social media, which later became published works.

5. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.

— Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club (2007)

Film criticism doing philosophy’s job; the American author created a new avatar for his generation.

BONUS: MORE FROM COUPLAND

The previous excursion into knowledge-and-wisdom got its own Coupland addendum, so it seemed only fair to give Philosophy one — five more marginal definitions from Generation X (1991) that lean toward mortality, meaning, and the self rather than epistemology.

1. Dorian Graying: The unwillingness to gracefully allow one’s body to show the signs of aging.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

Oscar Wilde gave the fear of mortality a portrait in the attic; Coupland gave it a gym membership.

2. Derision Preemption: A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers.

— Douglas Coupland

A whole philosophy of selfhood built on never being caught caring about anything.

3. Divorce Assumption: A form of Safety Net–ism, the belief that if a marriage doesn’t work out, then there is no problem because partners can simply seek a divorce.

— Douglas Coupland

A quiet little theory of commitment, and what happens to meaning once every promise comes with an exit clause.

4. Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence.

— Douglas Coupland

Rootlessness rebranded as a philosophy of life, decades before anyone called it “digital nomadism.”

5. Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

— Douglas Coupland

A social diagnosis dressed as a glossary entry, conjuring images of the disparity between those golden people frolicking on the Copacabana beach in Rio, in the shadows of a million jammed into the Favela ghettos on the hill.

Philosophy as a category may seem heavy for this ongoing series of Hooks, Lines, and Zingers. But one can find humor when searching for truth and enlightenment. It can be hidden in essays, comedian monologues, books, folk and rock music lyrics, cartoons, TV commentary, and commencement speeches

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Some philosophical writing was never trying to be serious in the first place — it was trying to be true. Truth, delivered honestly, can come out funny, satirical, and ironic. Douglas Adams built an entire galaxy around the joke that the universe might not mean anything. Woody Allen proved you could demolish two thousand years of logic with a single bad syllogism about Socrates.

This collection follows that lineage: the wits who took on the big, unanswerable questions — why we’re here, whether anything means anything, what we owe each other — and refused to be solemn about it. Christopher Hitchens drew a straight line from philosophy to chemistry to astronomy, each one just religion after it grew up. Tim Minchin turned a dinner-party rant about faith into a beat poem. David Foster Wallace covers thousands in his collection of essays, A Supposedly Funny Thing I Will Never Do Again. In several of these and Take 2 next week, the joke is often where the real argument and insights are hiding.

THE ORIGINALS

From my original, aged collection — no annotations needed.

1. Everything is nonsense, but I understand.

— Counting Crows

2. Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo.

— Robert Byrne

3. He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

4. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

— Douglas Adams

5. There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

— Douglas Adams

6. The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

— Douglas Adams

7. Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.

— Charles M. Schulz (Snoopy)

8. I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

— Richard Feynman, letter to Armando Garcia J., December 11, 1985

9. The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

— Sophocles

10. Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

— Groucho Marx

11. And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

— Earl Mac Rauch, Buckaroo Banzai

12. Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

— Robert C. Benchley

13. I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought, “What the hell good would that do?”

— Ronnie Shakes

14. People engaged in the worst wrongdoing are often convinced they’re in the right. One of the great ironies in world history.

— Anonymous

15. The best things in life aren’t things.

— Ann Landers

16. Leaving is not the only way to go.

— Roger Miller, in Big River

17. Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

— Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

18. An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

— Aldous Huxley

19. Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical.

— Yogi Berra

20. Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

— E. B. White

21. Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

— Lewis Carroll

22. Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?

– Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

23. I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got a 100.

– Woody Allen

That’s the starting lineup — the one where Douglas Adams shares a stage with a beagle-owning cartoonist and a man who described his own principles as negotiable. I used AI to find candidates for the next section of Take 1, with contributions from noted authors, cynics, critics, and clowns.

PART ONE: THE 21ST-CENTURY INTELLECTUALS

The philosophers in this era gained fame in everything from essays and books to headlining commencement ceremonies.

1. The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

— David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water,” Kenyon College commencement address (2005), from the late satirist, humorist, and iconoclast, who might need his own collection of trenchant one-liners shared in the future.

The fish-don’t-know-they’re-swimming speech — from an oft-quoted commencement address.

2. Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

— Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (2007)

The English and American humorist cynically demotes three thousand years of belief into three professional lineages.

3. Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals.

— Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens rarely made an argument without also making an enemy — often in the same sentence.

4. Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

— Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight (2010)

A working definition of ethics short enough to fit on a fortune cookie and sturdy enough to survive contact with the real world, from this noted English author, humorist, and satirist.

5. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

— Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address (2005)

Hindsight, dressed up as a design principle.

6. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

— Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address (2005)

The line that launched a thousand inspirational posters, for better and worse.

7. Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

— J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address (2008)

Failure, reframed as architecture.

8. What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

— George Saunders, Syracuse University convocation address (2013)

Went viral after the New York Times posted it, then grew into his book Congratulations, by the Way. The American novelist was known for his takes on the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture, and the role of mass media.

9. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

— George Saunders, Syracuse University convocation address (2013)

About as close as anyone has come to a philosophy syllabus in a single sentence.

10. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds.

— Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

Written before most of us knew we needed to hear it, which is usually how these things go. Harari is a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an Israeli medievalist, military historian, and public intellectual.

Next: Satirists and Performers, Page-Bound Wit, and Millennial Fragments

I added a collection from 21^st-century intellectuals found through AI research, most notably the best of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Yuval Noah Harari. Take 2 closes with: Satirists and Performers, Page-Bound Wit, Millennial Fragments, and a Gen X Bonus.

THE SATIRISTS AND PERFORMERS

This century’s best knowledge-and-wisdom zingers were mostly written to be watched rather than read — a TV monologue, a beat poem, a webcomic — which changes their rhythm; they lean on the turn of the phrase and timing more than a straightforward satirical stab.

1. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing “look over there.”

— Randall Munroe, xkcd #552 (2009)

Munroe has a physics degree. His first job was as a roboticist with NASA. He started blogging about oddities in life, nature, and human interactions, illustrated with stick figure cartoons in his webcomic, and built a following for his quasi-scientific twists

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2. Truthiness is what I say is right, and nothing anyone else says could possibly be true.

— Stephen Colbert, on introducing “truthiness,” The Colbert Report (2005)

Named the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year — a rare case of satire coining the vocabulary everyone actually needed.

3. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books — they’re all fact, no heart.

— Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report (2005)

The bit that made “truthiness” make sense: facts as a personal inconvenience.

4. You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.

— Tim Minchin, “Storm” (2009)

Minchin, an English-Australian comedian and songwriter, has fun satirizing dinner-party and idle conversations.

5. The Onion Book of Known Knowledge

— The Onion (2012)

The title is a joke by itself: an entire reference work of “known knowledge,” from a newspaper whose specialty is making things up.

THE PAGE-BOUND WITS (1975–2000)

Before the monologue and the webcomic, the same instincts lived in essays, comic strips, and glossaries.

1. All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.

— Woody Allen, “My Philosophy,” Without Feathers (1975)

A straight-faced mock-syllogism that demolishes formal logic.

2. Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.

— Woody Allen

A pun that only lands if the reader half-remembers high school physics.

3. Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met.

— Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life (1978)

The American author, film critic, columnist, and occasional subject of documentaries delivered some of her best lines in appearances with David Letterman, Seth Myers, and Bill Maher.

4. The more you know, the harder it is to take decisive action. Once you are informed, you start seeing complexities and shades of gray… Ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing.

— Calvin, in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes (1985–1995)

A six-year-old’s epistemology, delivered with more confidence than most op-eds.

5. 101-ism: The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

One of the marginal glossary definitions that made the novel feel like it came with footnotes for its own era. See below for more classics from Coupland.

THE MILLENNIAL FRAGMENT

No single writer owns the millennial or Gen Z sensibility the way Coupland owned Gen X. Here are some attempts.

1. FOMO and FOBO are irreconcilably opposing forces, the antithesis of yin and yang, and can drive a person towards a paralytic state I’ll call FODA, or Fear of Doing Anything.

— Patrick McGinnis, “Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis’ Two FOs,” The Harbus (2004)

A satirical column in a business-school newspaper that accidentally gave the internet its favorite acronyms on Fear of Mission Out and Fear of Better Options.

2. A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

— Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)

The gap between believing you’re brilliant and actually being useful, from an American author and editor.

3. Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned.

— Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

A diploma’s worth of irony, delivered flat, from the America author, screenwriter, and educator.

4. It was acceptable to brag, so long as those brags were ever-so-thinly disguised as transparent humility.

— Harris Wittels, on coining “humblebrag,” Humblebrag: The Art of False Modesty (2012)

I am proud to report that I had fun with an earlier Substack column on humblebragging.

5. Everything tangled in the string of everything else. Now, when her cat vomited, she thought she heard the word praxis.

— Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (2021)

A perfect satire of the internet-poisoned mind mistaking buzzwords for insight from this American poet, novelist, and essayist, who won a Thurber Prize for humor.

BONUS: MORE FROM COUPLAND

Coupland owned an entire generation’s vocabulary. Generation X (1991) is dense with marginal definitions. These five stayed closest to the knowledge-and-wisdom lane.

1. Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

A defense mechanism so common it needed its own diagnosis — wit deployed to avoid ever actually saying what you mean.

2. Legislated Nostalgia: To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

The neatest available description of borrowed knowledge — history handed down as homework rather than lived.

3. Option Paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

Calvin got there with “knowledge is paralyzing”; Coupland gave the syndrome a name for his generation.

4. Conspicuous Minimalism: The non-ownership of material goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

Repackaging the self-indulgent narcissist.

5. Hyperkarma: A deeply rooted belief that punishment will somehow always be far greater than the crime: ozone holes for littering.

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

A folk epistemology in one line — how a generation quietly convinced itself the universe was keeping score.

It seemed logical to group the two topics together, with knowledge hopefully leading to wisdom. In researching more candidates, I found that wasn’t always the case. Scholars noted that knowledge is the pile of things you can look up; wisdom is knowing which ones are worth looking up in the first place.

This leads to the first grouping of Original Entries from my collection, led by Confucius. Real knowledge, he said, is knowing the extent of your own ignorance. From the originals, this two-part series will go through the eons to current pundits, humorists, and philosophers. Twenty-five centuries after Confucius, Nassim Taleb was making the same point with a sharper elbow, arguing that the unread books on your shelf tell you more than the read ones do.

That’s the thread running through this collection: the gap between accumulating facts and actually being smart about them, mined by everyone from Talmudic scholars to a six-year-old comic-strip philosopher named Calvin, who concluded that knowledge is paralyzing. Along the way I found writers who turned the gap itself into a punchline. Douglas Coupland gave social confusion its own dictionary entry. A Harvard Business School newspaper column accidentally gave the internet the word “FOMO.” Stephen Colbert gave a whole decade the word “truthiness.”

This first take includes 25 quotes, with annotations on some of the latest. Take 2 next week will add 20 to wrap up the collection, to be followed by two takes on Philosophy.

THE ORIGINALS

Where the collection started, in a file folder in my desk drawer — the straight stuff, no annotations required.

1. Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s own ignorance.

— Confucius

2. Some men study so much they don’t have time to know.

— The Talmud

3. Wisdom is knowing when you can’t be wise.

— Paul Engle

4. Success is ninety-nine percent failure.

— Soichiro Honda

5. The superior man is distressed by his lack of ability.

— Confucius

6. When people are least sure, they are most dogmatic.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

7. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

— Albert Einstein

8. We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.

— Thomas Alva Edison

9. My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.

— Noel Coward

10. He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

— Proverbs 17:27

11. A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

— Edward R. Murrow

12. Where facts are few, experts are many.

— Donald R. Gannon

13. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

14. Often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.

— Cicero

15. Common sense is not so common.

— Voltaire

ON WISDOM… FROM DR. SEUSS

Congratulations!! Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

That’s the founding lineup. Candidates emerged from books, newspaper columns, comic strips, cartoons, speeches, and other works meant to be read. Then, with the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s and the continuing evolution of the digital world, we are inundated with knowledge and wisdom, or lack thereof, from all forms of social media and non-traditional media. With artificial intelligence tools, it has become easier to find new candidates for this category (and eventual chapter in the books). Here’s where it goes next: the 21^st-Century Intellectuals, to be followed next week by Satirists and Performers, Page-Bound Wit, Millennial Fragments, and a Gen X Bonus.

PART ONE: THE 21ST-CENTURY INTELLECTUALS

The public-intellectual era gave us scientists and writers who could turn ignorance into a punchline without losing the argument.

1. I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

A brilliant introduction to the thinking of this celebrated astrophysicist.

2. The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017)

A one-sentence repartee for the entitled.

3. The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2017)

The idea that admitting what you don’t know is itself the breakthrough.

4. Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

— Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

This could be an introduction to the Philosophy collection.

5. Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love — close enough on the surface, but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb, a celebrated scholar and aphorist, wrote a five-volume work on the nature of uncertainty, among other classics.

6. My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A hobby he has practiced, by his own account, with great discipline.

7. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007)

His “anti-library” idea – the unread shelf is a better map of your ignorance than the read one is of your expertise.

8. The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012)

Stoicism rebranded for people who read business books on airplanes.

9. My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily, then you are blind to all that the universe has to offer.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Reddit AMA (2011)

Certainty, in his view, is a symptom rather than an achievement.

10. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (2011)

Harari, a populist historian and scholar, coined the term dataism for a philosophy or mindset that worships big data.

Next: Satirists and Performers, Page-Bound Wit, Millennial Fragments, and a Gen X Bonus

· “Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.” – Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC

· “I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.” – Miss Alabama in the Miss USA contest

· “Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean, I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.” - Mariah Carey

· “Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.” – Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign

· “The word genius isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.” – Joe Theisman, former NFL football quarterback and sports analys

t

The fun continued in Take 2. Here are some highlights:

Our nation was blessed with one of the most prolific gaffemeisters in recent history, Dan Quayle, 44th vice president of the United States from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. As covered last week, President Biden made significant contributions to the collection in the past two years, despite his staff providing teleprompter copy for everything, including chatting with Jill over dinner.

President Trump is now contributing some of the greatest, brilliant, most beautiful non-sequiturs in the history of the universe. Unfortunately, we had difficulty extracting cogent snippets from his recent press conferences, with sentences averaging 342 words and lacking active verbs.

· “Smocking Gun” and “Moot stuffed with alligators and snakes” – President Trump’s tweets on solving illegal immigration at the Southern border

· “We’ve cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, and 1500 percent. I don’t mean 50 percent. I mean 1400, 1500 percent.” – President Trump

The Private Eye Collection

Founded in 1961, Private Eye is Britain’s long-running satirical magazine, famed for its fearless mix of wit, parody, and investigative journalism. Each issue blends sharp cartoons, lampooned headlines, and serious scoops that often break major stories long before the mainstream press. It has regular columns including: Mediaballs, long-running section title that puns on the slang word “balls” (meaning nonsense or rubbish) combined with “media” to highlight the ridiculous, nonsensical blunders made by sports commentators and television presenters; Street of Shame, a derogatory pun on Fleet Street, the traditional historical home of the British press, reframing it as a hub of scandalous behavior; and Called to Ordure, the column reporting on the chaotic state of Westminster and parliamentary misbehavior and playing on the Speaker of the House’s famous cry of “Order, order!” while replacing it with ordure (a formal word for dung or filth).

Here are some recent gaffes from the UK Media:

· “That’s when the wheels have come off when the bar is raised.” David Croft, Sky Sports.

· “It’s a huge game. It’s been a long time in the mating.” Kelly Cates, BBC1.

· “He (Zverev) has put in some horror performances, interspersed with some amazing performances –even though he’s been unbelievably consistent.” Annabelle Croft, Radio 5 live.

· “He got it up to 135 or so on the Richter scale, miles per hour, on that service.” John McEnroe, TNT sports.

· “The referee blows his tackle.“ Chris Kendall, Sky Sports.

· “A very unique football stadium, as you say, like many others around the country.“ Francis Benali, Radio 5 Live.

· “He saw his name in headlights.“ Ally McCoist, TNT Sports.

· “Liverpool will be looking to wrong the right they experienced last Tuesday evening.“ Andy Goldstein, TalkSport.

· “I think it’s Judd‘s turn to have a nice little rub of the balls.“ Joe Perry, C5.

· “Oh, he’s striking his balls, lovely at the moment.” Dennis Taylor, BBC.

· “And they’re finally making their way off the field, the Chelsea players, pulling themselves off.“ John Southall, Radio 5 Live.

· “Table tennis is relatively inexpensive to play – all you need is a couple of balls and a bat.” John Watson, BBC

· “The cast has been dyed.” Simon Jordan, TalkSport

· “You don’t see it often these days, so it’s rarity when it does happen.“ Stewart Bingham, BBC2

· “How he used his body to get it between himself and the ball.” Alan Shearer, Prime Video.

· “John Higgins needs to get some balls under his belt.“ Steve Davis, BBC2

As noted in the first post in this four-part series, I highlighted how I first became aware of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It introduced me to some of his classic approaches to humor and hyperbole. With AI, I found 100 of his most-cited one-liners and philosophical boomerangs from many sources.

I narrowed the list to 50 and conducted additional research on reviews of his works and interpretations by a wide range of scholars. In Take 2, I covered 1 through 18.

Take 3 covered 19 to 39. This final take covers 40 to 50, with a bonus entry on the Vogon Engineering mission and the demolition of Earth. Enjoy!

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

40. Adams opens with the observation that it is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase “as pretty as an airport” appear.

Context: The book begins at Heathrow. Adams uses airports as a sustained metaphor for modern purposelessness.

Technique: Negative philology. Proving a point by the absence of a phrase rather than its presence.

41. Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, checks himself into a London psychiatric hospital. The psychiatrist explains, patiently, that many people believe they are gods, that this is not unusual, and that with help he will come to understand that he is not Thor. Thor demonstrates otherwise by destroying the ward.

Context: Adams’ treatment of myth encountering modernity — the gods have not diminished; the world has simply stopped believing in them.

Technique: Category error as comedy. Clinical rationalism applied to the genuinely supernatural produces absurdity.

42. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Context: Though widely attributed to Adams in interviews and speeches, this line captures Dirk Gently’s worldview as much as Adams’ own writing practice.

Technique: Redefinition of a negative as an aesthetic pleasure. One of the most quoted lines in publishing

43. Odin, having retired from godhood, sits in a room watching television. He has adapted to modernity entirely too well, and the adaptation is presented as a defeat.

Context: Adams treats the diminishment of the gods not as tragedy but as a kind of comfortable mediocrity.

Technique: Bathos applied to mythology. The divine made suburban.

Last Chance to See

44. The aye-aye of Madagascar is considered by locals to be an omen of death — so when one appears, they kill it. Adams notes that the aye-aye is, therefore, genuinely an omen of death, just not in the way anyone intended.

Context: Adams’ most concise piece of ecological dark comedy. The superstition creates the outcome it predicts.

Technique: Self-fulfilling prophecy as irony.

45. The kakapo — a large, flightless, nocturnal parrot of New Zealand — is so spectacularly poorly adapted to survival that it appears to have evolved in a place with no predators whatsoever. This was, in fact, exactly what happened. Then predators arrived.

Context: Adams’ affectionate description of evolutionary misfortune. The kakapo did everything right, and then the world changed.

Technique: Tragic irony delivered straight. The sympathy and the comedy are inseparable.

46. Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine travel to one of the most remote places on Earth to observe an extremely rare animal — and when they find it, it is asleep.

Context: The anti-climax as nature writing. Ten thousand miles in pursuit of a sleeping animal.

Technique: Deflation of expedition heroics. The journey and the destination are inverted in value.

The Meaning of Liff

47. The Meaning of Liff assigns place names to common experiences that have no words: e.g., “SHOEBURYNESS: the vague, uncomfortable feeling one gets sitting on a seat that is still warm from someone else.”

Context: Adams and Lloyd’s lexicographical comedy — the premise being that all the good words are being wasted on places while all the important human experiences go unnamed.

Technique: Humor in the gap between language and experience.

Speeches & Essays

48. The Parable of the Puddle: a puddle wakes up one morning and thinks, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — how remarkable it is that this hole in the ground is exactly the right shape to fit me.” Adams uses this to illustrate the anthropic fallacy — that the universe appears designed for us because we are the ones doing the looking.

Context: One of Adams’ most celebrated public ideas was delivered at a Biota conference (“a charitable organization established to support new research on the science of life’s origins and to explore its wider implications for humanity”).

Technique: Fable as philosophical argument. The absurdity of the puddle makes the human version of the same reasoning visible.

49. Adams distinguishes three categories of technological response: things that existed before you were born (normal); things invented in your lifetime (exciting); and things invented after you turned 35 (unnatural and in need of regulation).

Context: One of Adams’ most quoted riffs on generational attitudes to technology. Delivered at UC Santa Barbara shortly before his death.

Technique: Age-bracket comedy with a serious point – the arbitrariness of the threshold.

50. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light — with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Context: From Mostly Harmless. One of Adams’ most compact and quotable constructions.

Technique: Pseudo-scientific observation applied to human experience. Physics as a metaphor for information anxiety.

Bonus: The Final Insult to Earth

Earth’s Demolition Notice and The Vogon Constructor Fleet: The Vogon Constructor Fleet arrives to demolish Earth for a hyperspace bypass. Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz announces that the relevant planning notices have been on display at the local planning office on Alpha Centauri for fifty years, and that failure to observe them constitutes a failure to take an interest in local affairs. It is a construction fleet executing a project. They do not hate the beings they destroy. They simply find compassion an inefficient use of time and have not been programmed to factor it into project timelines. The demolition of Earth is, from their perspective, running slightly ahead of schedule.

Context: The entire apparatus of planning permission — public notice, objection periods, bureaucratic due diligence — applied to the destruction of an inhabited planet. The paperwork was filed correctly. The planet’s residents simply didn’t make the trip.

Technique: Civic jargon and processing as atrocity. The demolition is not wrong; it is merely inconvenient for those who didn’t read the notice. Genocide is reframed as project management. The Vogons are not villains; they are civil servants. The name – the Vogon Constructor Fleet – is an ironic insult to common sense and reality.

I narrowed the list to 50, conducted additional research into reviews of his works and interpretations by a wide range of scholars, and in Take 2, last week, covered 1 through 18. Here is Take 3 of the collection, featuring Nos. 19-39, with 40-50 to follow next week in Take 4

Caption: I think this will go well with your wine!

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

19. The Universe was created — an event that has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Context: Adams’ famous opening observation, launching the second book. The creation of existence is treated as a PR disaster.

Technique: Cosmic bathos. The most significant event in history is framed as a management error.

20. Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe: you can make a reservation in advance, then travel forward in time to the date. The matter of payment is solved by depositing a penny in any bank account — compound interest over the heat death of the universe covers the bill.

Context: Adams’ financial logic, applied to time travel. It is entirely consistent and completely useless.

Technique: Rigorous application of economics to an absurd premise.

21. The main course at Milliways is introduced by the animal itself: a cow that has been bred to want to be eaten and comes to the table to enthusiastically recommend its own cuts.

Context: Adams’ most discussed piece of food ethics satire — Zaphod is delighted; Arthur is horrified.

Technique: Moral discomfort made literal. The problem with eating animals is solved by making them complicit.

22. Anyone capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Context: Adams’ analysis of democratic governance. The qualities required to win power are precisely those that disqualify one from wielding it wisely.

Technique: Logical paradox as political satire. True then; true now; likely true forever.

Additional Evidence: “In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.” -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

23. The Disaster Area stunt ship: piloted by a fully automated computer, it will dive into the sun to create a spectacular light show. The band watches from the safety of a party ship, conveniently several billion miles away.

Context: Adams’ portrait of rock-star excess taken to its cosmic conclusion.

Technique: Escalation to the point of self-parody. The gesture becomes inseparable from the retreat.

24. The Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation: their complaints department now covers all the major land masses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau system.

Context: Scale as punchline. The measurement of corporate failure goes interplanetary.

Technique: Quantifying abstraction. Customer dissatisfaction rendered in geographical terms.

Life, the Universe and Everything

25. “The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

Context: Adams’ explanation of Hitchhiker-universe physics. The trick is distraction: you must forget to hit the ground.

Technique: Reframing the impossible as a matter of attitude. The joke is that physics is presented as a skill anyone could develop.

26. The Total Perspective Vortex shows you the entire universe in perspective — and your place in it. The effect instantly destroys the mind, because the universe is so vast that one’s importance is effectively zero.

Context: Adams uses the device to satirize both cosmic indifference and human ego. Zaphod survives because his ego is, effectively, the size of the universe — the Vortex shows him a small notice: “You are here.”

Technique: Comic inversion. A device meant to destroy Zaphod simply confirms what he already believed about himself. (TG Note: how many times have you been in a strange place, looked at a map, seen the arrow, and didn’t understand?)

27. The people of Krikkit looked up, saw the sky full of stars, and said, “We will kill everything.”

Context: Adams’ most concise portrait of provincial xenophobia — the most dangerous beings in the galaxy are those who simply cannot imagine that anything exists beyond their own world.

Technique: Compression of horror. Four words of dialogue contain an entire civilizational pathology.

28. “It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”

Context: Ford Prefect’s observation. It is not clear what problem was being attempted with potatoes, which makes it funnier.

Technique: Aphorism made absurd by specificity. The general wisdom is undermined by the vegetable.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

29. The dolphins had been attempting for years to warn humanity that the Earth was about to be destroyed. Their warnings were interpreted as amusing acrobatics.

Context: Adams revisits the dolphin theme of the first book — the most intelligent Earth creatures tried to help and were met with applause.

Technique: Miscommunication as tragedy. The joke and the indictment occupy the same sentence. (TG Note: this is a more sophisticated way of dismissing something or someone than practiced by George Carlin and other comedians: “F-U very much.”

30. Rob McKenna, the Rain God: everywhere he travels, it rains. He has catalogued 231 different types of rain, none of which he considers pleasant. Clouds gather around him as an act of worship; he takes it personally.

Context: A god and his devotees — where the devotees are meteorological, and the god is unaware and unhappy.

Technique: Divine relationship inverted. The deity has no power over his worshippers; they simply follow him everywhere. (TG Note: see Monty Python and “The Life of Brian”)

Mostly Harmless

31. “He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.”

Context: Arthur Dent’s theology, mid-crisis. The revised position is philosophically cleaner but no more comforting.

Technique: Logical but whimsical self-correction that changes nothing.

32. The new Earth — rebuilt from scratch by the mice — turns out to be identical to the old one, except that it is slightly more irritating.

Context: Adams’ conclusion about the nature of Earth: the problem is not the planet; the problem is irreproducible.

Technique: The reset button as comic philosophy. Reconstruction produces the same result.

33. “A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

Context: One of Adams’ most widely quoted observations — applicable to technology, politics, and product design simultaneously.

Technique: Aphorism with a double reversal.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

34. The Electric Monk: a labor-saving device that believes things for you — so you don’t have to.

Context: The opening concept of the Dirk Gently series. The current model, a budget version, has developed a fault and now believes everything is pink.

Technique: Satire on outsourced belief. Adams applies consumer capitalism directly to faith.

35. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

Context: Dirk Gently’s philosophy of navigation — and, Adams suggests, a reasonable attitude toward life.

Technique: Reframing failure as destiny. The self-consolation is plausible enough to be funny, tragic, and genuinely useful.

36. “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”

Context: Dirk Gently, explaining his methods. The argument is characteristically circular and characteristically convincing.

Technique: Mock-epistemology. The distinction between impossible and improbable is inverted for comic philosophical effect.

37. “Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

Context: Dirk Gently, building to a plan. The escalating abstractions collapse with the verb “eff.”

Technique: Rhetorical inflation punctured at the last moment.

38. Dirk Gently’s fee structure: he charges for expenses only, not for detection — on the grounds that detecting is thinking, and he has not yet found a way to charge for thinking, though he is actively working on it.

Context: Adams’ portrait of a man who has turned self-justification into an art form.

Technique: The business model as character study. Dirk’s billing practices reveal more about his personality than any direct description.

39. The sofa stuck on the stairs of Reg’s house: by every mathematical calculation it cannot be there — it cannot have fit around any of the angles — and yet there it is.

Context: A physical comedy problem that Adams elevates to the level of philosophy. The sofa becomes a symbol of all the inexplicable facts we simply live with.

Technique: The mundane impossibility. Its power comes from being completely real and entirely unexplained.

What book did Elon Musk put in the glovebox of the Tesla he shot into space? Check out my new post on Substack.

With AI, I found 100 of his most-cited illusions, hyperbole, convoluted philosophical thinking, one-liners, and lengthy setups that deliver a satirical punchline. I narrowed the list to 50 and found references that added insights on context and technique (which is far more than anyone would care to know!). Here is Take 2 of the collection, featuring No. 1 through 18

.

1. “Don’t Panic.”

Context: The only two words printed on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — in large, friendly letters. Adams returns to this throughout the series; it doubles as a motto for life.

Technique: Bathos as a life philosophy. Comic power through understatement.

2. “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

Context: Ford Prefect’s contribution to philosophical thought. He is, as Adams notes, a drunk.

Technique: Logic escalation. Takes an abstract claim and makes it concrete and appetizing.

3. The Vogon ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

Context: Adams’ description of the Vogon fleet’s arrival over Earth. One of the most cited similes in comic fiction.

Technique: Inverted simile — defines a thing by negating an impossible comparison. The absurdity is illuminated by contrast.

4. “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Context: The dolphins’ farewell message to humanity as they depart Earth moments before it is demolished. The fourth book takes this as its title.

Technique: The punchline is delayed across 130 pages. The joke rewards readers who stay for the whole ride, with a brilliant sardonic twist (to be explained in Take 3, so you may continue to hang around).

5. The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42.

Context: Deep Thought, the second-greatest computer ever built, takes 7.5 million years to compute this answer — only for everyone to realize no one can remember what the question was.

Technique: The anti-climax as metaphysical satire. The joke is that humanity has always had the answer without understanding the question.

6. “Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”

Context: Marvin the Paranoid Android, to Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. Marvin possesses a brain the size of a planet and is routinely asked to open doors.

Technique: Existential despair played for comedy. Marvin’s melancholy is irresistibly quotable because it is disproportionate and entirely logical.

7. The Babel Fish: a small yellow creature you insert in your ear that translates any language in the universe — and whose very existence has been used to disprove God.

Context: Adams constructs a full theological argument: since the fish is so improbably useful, it is proof of God; but proof removes faith; removing faith removes God; therefore, God vanishes in a puff of logic. God then uses a similar argument to prove that black is white and is killed at the next zebra crossing.

Technique: Comic syllogism — takes a logical chain seriously until it collapses in absurdity.

8. “I’d far rather be happy than right any day.” / “And are you?” / “No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.”

Context: Slartibartfast, planetary designer. The admission undermines the entire philosophy it was meant to support.

Technique: Self-defeating logic. The joke is in the cheerful candor with which the argument is abandoned.

9. Earth’s entry in the Hitchhiker’s Guide was, originally, a single word: “Harmless.” After Ford Prefect spent fifteen years researching a revised entry, the editors changed it to two words: “Mostly harmless.”

Context: A lifetime of work reduced to one adverb.

Technique: Compression as comedy. Everything that was lost between the first and second editions is the actual joke.

10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide outsells the Encyclopaedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper and has the words “Don’t Panic” on the cover in large, friendly letters.

Context: Adams’ editorial comment on the relative merits of accuracy versus reassurance.

Technique: Satirizes the publishing industry.

11. “He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.”

Context: Adams’ description of a minor character — a line that could describe half the protagonists in literary history.

Technique: Domestic reality. The grand intellectual label is punctured by the mundane authority of a spouse.

12. The bowl of petunias, called into existence by the Improbability Drive alongside a sperm whale, has a single thought as it falls: “Oh no, not again.”

Context: Adams plants the suggestion that the bowl of petunias has a history — one it cannot possibly have — and leaves the reader to imagine the circumstances that made this familiar.

Technique: Implied backstory. What about those sperm whales falling?

13. Zaphod Beeblebrox: “recently voted the worst dressed sentient being in the known universe for the seventh time.”

Context: A detail Adams uses to establish Zaphod’s celebrity — intergalactic notoriety.

Technique: Absurdist credential. The achievement is real; the category is invented.

14. The towel is described as the most useful item a hitchhiker can carry: it has psychological value beyond its physical use, because anyone who can still produce a towel after hitchhiking the galaxy must be a “hoopy frood.”

Context: Ford Prefect’s explanation to Arthur Dent. The chapter spawned International Towel Day (May 25).

Technique: Mock-serious taxonomy. Elaborate reasoning is applied to an absurd premise.

15. Slartibartfast: he designed the fjords of Norway, for which he won an award. The ceremony was unfortunately held five minutes after the Earth was destroyed (coverage of the Vogon destruction project is in Take Four).

Context: An artist’s relationship to recognition, taken to its logical extreme.

Technique: Cosmic timing as comedy. Pride and disappointment occupy the same sentence.

16. The mice are, in fact, the most intelligent creatures on Earth — pan-dimensional beings using the planet as a giant computer to determine the Ultimate Question.

Context: Adams inverts the animal-intelligence hierarchy. Humans, dolphins, and mice exist in descending order of cosmic intelligence, with mice at the top.

Technique: Hierarchy inversion. Scientific and philosophical pomposity punctured by rodents.

17. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s Genuine People Personalities: androids so cheerful and helpful that they are deeply, profoundly annoying (more on the Sirius Customer Service Empire in Take 3).

Context: Adams’ satire on customer-facing corporate design. The robots have been optimized for happiness, not utility.

Technique: Critique of forced positivity.

18. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After months of observation, he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one: if they don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.

Context: Ford Prefect’s evolving anthropology of humanity.

Technique: The revised hypothesis and punchline arrive as a scientific correction.

NEXT: Entries 19 to 39.

CAPTION: The Babel Fish is helping Ford Perfect say goodbye to the universe.

The collection was fine-tuned and published as a book in 1979. According to the first reviews I read of the Guide, Adams approached every subject – the universe, evolution, digital watches, sperm whales materializing at altitude, earth’s demolition, an electric monk – by first setting up what was most absurd about it, followed by a zinger or two. I started using excerpts in my work for clients and in my writing for marketing, PR, technology, humor, and other online and print media.

Adams was born in 1952, read English literature at St John’s College, Cambridge, and spent his early career bouncing between sketch comedy, script editing, and a growing suspicion that science and philosophy were simply too important to be left to people without a sense of humor. He found his voice, and his audience, when Hitchhiker transferred from radio to a sequence of five novels he cheerfully described as “a trilogy,” apparently considering arithmetic as optional as plot resolution.

Beyond Hitchhiker, he gave us Dirk Gently — a “holistic detective” whose methods owed more to cosmic coincidence than conventional investigation — and Last Chance to See, a surprisingly tender account of traveling the world in search of species on the brink of extinction. He died in 2001at age 49 of a heart attack, leaving behind the unanswerable suspicion that the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose — and that this is, on balance, quite funny. He told interviewers he was a comedy writer in the science fiction genre, not a science fiction writer.

According to Wikipedia, Adams was highly regarded by the generation of Silicon Valley technologists who had grown up with his work. Yahoo’s Babel Fish translation service is named after Adams’s fictional creature, which translates languages. Chess-playing computers Deep Thought and Deep Blue were named after his fictional Deep Thought supercomputer. Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind was also named in homage. Elon Musk called the writer the “best philosopher ever”, and in 2018 he launched a Tesla car into space with a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide in its glovebox. Musk stated that the Grok chatbot is inspired by the fictional guidebook. The Wall Street Journal also compared Eddie, the annoyingly upbeat AI from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to AI chatbots.

Adams was a founder patron of the British charity Save the Rhino. In 1994, he participated in a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro for the charity, wearing a rhino costume. In memory of Adams, the organization has a lecture series each year on topics he covered, and a Running Rhinos team competes in marathons globally to raise funds. The lecture brings Douglas’ fans together, shares insights into many fascinating topics with brilliant speakers, and raises vital funds for rhino conservation. It is available online, too.

This is the first of four Substack columns on signature passages, one-liners, zingers, wordplay, and imaginative constructions and creations from Douglas Adams. The following are some of my earliest excerpts from the Guide, transcribed into a Word document for various uses:

· (Adams envisioned the Internet and portable computing power) …a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This has about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million pages could be summoned on a moment’s notice…if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

· If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation, he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

· Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Maaster Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem ‘Ode to a small lump of green putty I found in my armpit one summer morning’, four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.

· When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have, you’ll know that before any new product can be developed, it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they related to it, what sort of image it has for them.

· … Zaphod Beeblebrox: recently voted the worst dressed sentient being in the known universe for the seventh time.

· The Nutri-Magic was designed and manufactured by the Sirus Cybernetics Corporation, whose complaints department now covers all the major land masses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system.

· There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

· …the loudest rock band in the galaxy. Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band’s public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitation treaties.

· …one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize, it is a well-known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job.

· Nothing travels faster than speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

The two previous columns dug into puns cracked at the grave, in the bedroom, and whispered around in the religions of the world. For this third installment, we’ll follow the money, the vote, the book cover, and thoughts on war.

Cash, Capitalism, and Entitlement

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gives it to,” wrote Dorothy Parker. She offers both a blessing and a cutting punch line. This works in 21^st-Century society, too!

Mark Twain liked to poke at capitalism. “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.” It reads like a compliment to good marketing. The double meaning of “large” – big in perception, not in reality – turns it into a diagnosis. The pun isn’t just on size; it’s on value. Ads don’t change what a thing is, only how loudly it shouts.

On surroundings and reality, Twain wrote: “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” He should be around this century to offer a few zingers on entitlement.

For a current take on marketing: “There’s always the concept that a product we buy will make the connection between who we are and who we’d like to be,” writes Paco Underhill, environmental psychologist, author, and the founder of market research and consulting company Envirosell, from his 2022 book.

Power, Politics, and Puns

When I was a financial journalist, a friend and former journalist who moved into politics suggested I apply for a press secretary opening a local congressman had in Washington, DC. His chief of staff gave me a lesson in reality. “On Wall Street, money is power; in Washington, it’s political power, or the perception of power, which you can help create.” I moved into PR and chose the fact-based, no-hype approach to build on my journalist experience, and it mostly worked. But I digress. Here are a few fun puns and zingers from politics.

Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary line, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” is a master class in political wordplay.

Twain’s “And suppose you were a member of Congress. And suppose you were an idiot. But I repeat myself” is a logical pun rather than a strictly linguistic one.

Another Twainism: “Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often.”

A few zingers for the record:

· Once businessmen are appointed to public office, they run the government like nobody’s business. – Anonymous

· In my many years, I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress. – John Adams

· In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office. – Ambrose Bierce

· Get the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. – Frank Dane

· Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature. – Kin Hubbard

· Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation. – Henry Kissinger

· The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. – P. J. O’Rourke

Judging a Book by Its Cover

Scholars note that a punning title establishes a double entendre and a unifying thread that brings premises and plots to life.

Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” sounds, to contemporary ears, like an airy complaint: all that fuss for nothing. Elizabethan audiences heard an extra layer: “no‑thing” as slang for female anatomy. The title is therefore about gossip, scandal, and “nothing” in both senses. Inside the play, male anxiety over women’s chastity very nearly kills a young bride, which suggests that the pun in the title is not ornamental; it’s a thesis.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” pulls the same trick. “Ernest” is a name; “earnest” is a virtue. The plot centers on people who are trying desperately to be seen as both. When, at the end, Jack discovers that his “real” name is actually Ernest, it’s a theological joke disguised as a farce: he has been earnest all along, even while lying without compunction.

Joseph Heller’s “Catch‑22,” one of my favorite books, names a fictional military regulation whose logic eats its own tail: you can’t be excused from flying missions for insanity because requesting to be excused proves you’re sane.

Much of Heller’s prose in Catch-22 is circular and repetitive. Circular reasoning is widely used by some characters to justify their actions and opinions. Heller revels in paradox. For example: “The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him,” and “The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.”

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to, but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”

Catch-22 is now part of the global vocabulary for what American Heritage Dictionary notes is a situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently contradictory rules or conditions.

Neil Gaiman’s *American Gods* extends the title pun into a whole mythological system. The gods are old deities brought to the New World; they’re also the things Americans worship now – media, technology, highways, guns. “Gods” is literal in the plot and metaphorical in the critique and is reinforced over hundreds of pages.

A Few Words About War

As in Catch-22, writers in every century covered the horrors of war with sharp reporting and brilliant fiction and pilloried it with satire, puns, and hyperbole.

Franklin’s “hang together/hang separately” arises in the shadow of execution. Mark Twain chastised American xenophobia with a crack that “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

Kurt Vonnegut’s “So it goes,” repeated after every death in “Slaughterhouse‑Five”, is an increasingly numbing response to atrocity. The phrase itself becomes a verbal sigh of hopelessness.

Douglas Adams uses urban planning, bureaucratic, and human resources procedures and jargon to describe different approaches to intergalactic genocide.

The Vogon Constructor Fleet is on a mission to destroy Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass. The Vogons are described not as aggressors but as a workforce: a construction fleet executing a project. They do not hate the beings they destroy. They simply find compassion an inefficient use of time and have not been programmed to factor it into project timelines. The demolition of Earth is, from their perspective, running slightly ahead of schedule.

Context: Genocide reframed as project management. The Vogons are not villains; they are civil servants. Technique: Bureaucratic neutrality as moral horror.

(Editor’s note: more examples of Douglas Adams humor are planned for a future Substack column.)

This is the second stop in a tour of pun country. Last time, we lingered where language feels most overloaded: death, God, sex. This week, we move to a different frontier – where puns live not in a single word, but in the way a sentence is built, or in a brand‑new word that shouldn’t exist but suddenly does.

From the scholarly notes I found, these examples include: syntax that collapses under its own ambiguity; newspapers and headline writers who turn constraint into mischief; writers who coin words that feel like jokes, diagnoses, and prophecies all at once; and classic malapropisms from the news media.

When grammar is the punch line

One of the great modern all‑purpose puns looks almost boring on the page: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

The first clause is a clean simile: “time flies like an arrow.” The second clause reuses the same structure but throws in a twist and a chuckle.

Mark Twain’s “I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up” plays a similar game. A big intellect isn’t enough.

E. E. Cummings created a memorable line about an unsettled situation where “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” Scholars note that “how” is supposed to be an adverb. He treats it as an adjective. The sentence is perfectly intelligible and, according to schoolbook grammar, perfectly wrong. It has stopped readers in their tracks for decades.

Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, among others) specializes in great exaggerations to grab our attention. Often cited: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” Similes are supposed to offer likeness; Adams offers the opposite. Or take: “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” Philosophers maintain that time is not what it seems; Adams calmly agrees, then drags the thought down to the level of office-worker misery. I’ll have a separate column in a few weeks on nuggets from Douglas Adams, such as “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

These examples show the same basic move: set the reader up with a familiar line or construct, then do a little literary ju-jitsu with words of a different weight or twist.

Coined words as puns

Some of the most durable puns never look like puns again after they catch on. They start as little stunts of word‑making – private jokes, speculative hybrids, clumsy portmanteaux – and then quietly become the default name for a new piece of reality.

According to several sources, Lewis Carroll understood this instinctively in “Jabberwocky.” Words like “slithy” (slimy + lithe) and “mimsy” (miserable + flimsy) are obvious portmanteaux. At first encounter, they read as nonsense. Then others use the combinations, and they become part of the new dictionaries.

Dorothy Parker created “scaredy‑cat” when she needed a childish, sing‑song insult in one of her books in The New Yorker, and it has endured.

The twentieth century is rich with these jokey coinages that became serious. Joseph Heller’s Catch‑22 names an absurd military regulation that keeps airmen flying missions: if you ask to be grounded for insanity, the act of asking proves you’re sane enough to fly. The phrase now stands on its own as shorthand for any bureaucratic no‑win situation. Norman Mailer’s “factoid” arrives as a critique – a “fact” that isn’t one, a small counterfeit bit of information. William Gibson’s “cyberspace” feels so natural now that we forget it started life as a pulpy, slightly overblown compound in Neuromancer. Critics liked Sylvia Plath’s “dreamscape,” which lightly fuses dream and landscape.

10 notable pun headlines and malapropisms

1. “BRITISH LEFT WAFFLES ON FALKLANDS” – The San Francisco Chronicle*
   Plays on “waffles” as both a breakfast food and political indecision, turning a serious foreign‑policy story into a compact joke about dithering.

2. “IRAQI HEAD SEEKS ARMS” – various reprints, collected by Columbia School of Journalism
   The headline compresses geopolitics into a miniature: “head” as leader and body part, “arms” as both weapons and limbs, creating a textbook example of unintentional double meaning.

3. “POLICE BEGIN CAMPAIGN TO RUN DOWN JAYWALKERS” – widely anthologized
   “Run down” sits between “pursue aggressively” and “drive over,” so the line reads like a threat of vehicular mayhem rather than a safety initiative.

4. “RED TAPE HOLDS UP NEW BRIDGE” – collected in multiple “funny headline” lists
   Puns on “holds up” as delays versus physically supports; the joke exposes how bureaucratic language and engineering language collide in news copy.

5. “COLD WAVE LINKED TO TEMPERATURES” – widely circulated blooper
   Of course it is. The line shows how formulaic scientific reporting can become.

6. “QUEEN MARY HAVING BOTTOM SCRAPED” – classic from Dr. Beard’s headline collection
   Ostensibly about maintenance on the ocean liner Queen Mary, the headline’s phrasing invites the image of a monarch undergoing a humiliating procedure.

7. “PANDA MATING FAILS; VETERINARIAN TAKES OVER” – widely quoted in humor anthologies
   Reads as if the veterinarian personally steps in as romantic partner; in reality, it refers to artificial insemination.

8. “HOMICIDE VICTIMS RARELY TALK TO POLICE” – frequently cited in lists of headline puns
   Grammatically straight but pragmatically absurd.

9. “AUTO KILLS 110; LET’S RESOLVE TO DO BETTER” – Columbia School of Journalism archive
   The exhortation “do better” appears to encourage beating the annual death toll reported in a municipality rather than reducing it.

10. “YANKS FOR THE MEMORIES” – New York Post World Series cover
    A celebrated sports pun that riffs on “Thanks for the Memory,” swapping in “Yanks” for the Yankees; it has been singled out in baseball‑writing retrospectives as an example of how tabloids use rhyme and cultural reference to turn a game result into a keepsake phrase.

Next: titles that are themselves puns, and how a few choice words on the cover can rewrite the story you’re about to read – whether it’s Much Ado About Nothing, The Importance of Being Earnest, Catch 22, or American Gods.

My earlier Take 1 of famous puns from literary history started with perhaps the first pun in history, from Homer. The research moved to Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Dorothy Parker, among others.

Take 2 of Great Puns from Literary History twists and turns from Chaucer to Benjamin Franklin, to James Joyce, Groucho Marx, Alfred Hitchcock, and our hero from the Irish Collection, Flann O’Brien.

For those who consider puns the lowest form of humor, I used AI to find more classics from scripture, Shakespeare, coverage of wars and revolutions, essays on social change, humor columns, and even news headlines and social media clickbait that try to grab a reader’s attention, put a hard stop to scrolling, and drive a chuckle.

This semi-scholarly and mostly boring column meanders through how puns can be more than just dad jokes (e.g., “Two silkworms had a race. They ended up in a tie.”). I’ll start with the three things in previous generations we were never supposed to joke about – death, God, and sex. Writers have largely ignored the rule, thankfully, and here are some of the most cited in history. If it gets too dense, jump to the bottom for a few groaners.

The grave joke: laughing at death

Start with perhaps the most famous dying joke in literature. Mercutio, running through the streets of Verona, waves off concern with one last line: “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” The pun lets Mercutio acknowledge what’s happening without saying the flat, unstageable line: “I’m going to die.

”

That’s the double life of a good death pun. Beckett, writing centuries later in Waiting for Godot, pursues the same idea: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it is night once more.” There’s no obvious “joke,” but the image is a visual pun - trying to keep its footing between arrival and departure.

Kurt Vonnegut goes the other way in Slaughterhouse‑Five, avoiding anything as ornate as Mercutio’s wordplay. Instead, he gives us a three‑word refrain: “So it goes.” Every time someone dies, there it is again – flat, casual, almost bored. After the hundredth repetition, the phrase itself starts to feel like an emotionless pun on fatalism.

Scholars note that a pun on death or other tragedy lets you stand in two places at once – inside the horror, and just outside it, where you can still make a sound that isn’t a scream.

Holy wit: when theology bends language

Sacred texts, over the centuries, are cited for being packed with paronomasia – names that carry hidden meanings, prophetic lines that hinge on sound-alike roots. Ancient writers believed that God, if He exists, would be in the details of language as much as in the thunder. Later writers often take a more direct approach.

Dorothy Parker noted, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gives it to.” On its face, it’s a throwaway cocktail party quip. But structurally, scholars say it behaves like a sermon turned inside out. The pious cliché says that wealth is a sign of blessing; Parker merely nudges the sentence until “gives it to” sounds less like favor and more like divine sarcasm.

Mark Twain’s “God created war so that Americans would learn geography” runs on a similar track. It dresses itself up as an explanation of divine intent and plays with “learn” as a moral and a factual verb. You don’t just learn the map; you learn, or should learn, the human cost that makes the map legible. It’s a pun that works because we know it can’t possibly be true – God as curriculum designer – so Twain smacks us with a darker, metaphorical one.

(For a newer classic, from P.J. O’Rourke: “Drugs have taught an entire generation of kids the metric system.”)

Even T. S. Eliot’s famous “April is the cruellest month” in The Waste Land is a theological pun. It’s a reversal of the old tradition, such as in Chaucer’s cheerful April showers, where spring means rebirth and divine renewal. By calling April cruel, Eliot doesn’t just invert a seasonal cliché. Scholars opine that he quietly asks whether, if resurrection arrives in a spiritual landscape, it might feel more like torment than a blessing.

Country matters: sex, romance, and the low blow

Of the three difficult topics, sex is the one most closely associated with puns and is abundant, including among stand-up comedians and late-night television hosts over the years in the U.S. (Johnny Carson, Steve Allen, Conan O’Brien, David Letterman, and Jay Leno, among others). Shakespeare on sex alone could keep this series going for weeks. Hamlet’s exchange with Ophelia in the play‑within‑the‑play is practically a textbook: “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” he asks. She protests. “Do you think I meant country matters?” he replies. The joke is deliberately unsubtle; “lie” is both recline and have sex, and “country” was heard by Elizabethan ears as uncomfortably close to a certain four‑letter word for female anatomy.

In sorting through the AI research, I found the idea that the pun does a few things at once. It lets Hamlet humiliate Ophelia in public while maintaining a fig leaf of deniability; it rouses knowing guffaws from the groundlings at the Old Globe or other theaters; and it lets Shakespeare smuggle a sexual dynamic into a scene supposedly about art and politics.

Much Ado About Nothing goes even further by building the double meaning into the title. “Nothing” was slang for “no‑thing,” that is, a woman’s sexual anatomy. The title, which modern ears hear as “a big fuss over nothing,” was originally a dirty joke about men’s obsessions with “nothing” at all. Inside the play, scholars note, gossip and suspicion about a young woman’s chastity drive the plot to the brink of lethal violence.

Dorothy Parker, centuries later, keeps that tradition of weaponized innuendo alive. Her legendary party quip, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” The assigned word was “horticulture”; the pun splits it into “whore to culture,” sliding from gardening to sex work.

A Few Groaners to Lighten the Scholarly Load

· “If you’re going through Hell, keep going.” (A proverbial line often linked – without firm evidence – to Winston Churchill)

· “Clothes make the man; naked people have little or no influence on society.” (A Mark Twain chestnut, turning a proverb with a literal twist.)

· “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” (Lacks attribution, but some references said, Groucho Marx)

· “Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One says to the other, ‘Dam!’”

· “A dyslexic poet writes inverse.”

· “Napoleon may not have designed his coat, but he did have a hand in it.”

Next:

In the next installment, I’ll keep following those fault lines: titles that are jokes in disguise, the coined words that changed how we think, and the newspaper headlines that made or ruined a career.

Take 2 twists and turns from Chaucer to Benjamin Franklin, to James Joyce, Groucho Marx, Alfred Hitchcock, and our hero from the Irish Collection, Flann O’Brien.

Please provide additional leads in the comments. Thanks!

17. Time Flies Like an Arrow – Groucho Marx, attributed

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

Simultaneously a philosophical observation, an entomological fact, and a grammatical ambush. The sentence structure of the first clause lures you into parsing the second the same way, at which point the banana arrives. Linguists have cited it for decades as a model of syntactic ambiguity.

18. The Tuscaloosa Elephant – Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers, 1930

“Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about.”

Two puns – Tuscaloosa and irrelevant/irr-elephant – delivered in the same sentence, with the second disguised as a self-correction. The technique of pretending to abandon the pun while landing a second one is Groucho’s signature move, and one of the most studied examples of compound punning in performance comedy.

19. Time Wounds All Heels – Groucho Marx, attributed

“Time wounds all heels.”

The platitude “time heals all wounds” – inverted to observe that time is as likely to catch up with villains as to salve the suffering. A textbook paraprosdokian: a figure in which the second half of a phrase reverses the expectation set by the first. Clean, fast, and correct.

Part VI: The 20th-Century Masters

20. The Pun as Architecture – James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

The opening word “riverrun” contains river, run, and the French rêver (to dream). The final sentence of the book runs directly into the first, making the entire 628-page novel a single circular pun. Joyce spent seventeen years on it. Whether it is the greatest pun ever attempted or the longest practical joke in publishing history remains a matter of critical debate.

21. You Can’t Tuna Fish – Douglas Adams, attributed

“You can tune a guitar, but you can’t tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass.”

The sentence uses the homophonic qualities of “tune a” and “tuna,” followed immediately by a second pun on “bass”– both the string instrument and the fish. Two puns, one sentence, no wasted words.

22. Drawn and Quoted – Fred Allen, attributed

“Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.”

A reference to the old form of execution – drawn and quartered – redirected at punsters. The self-referential pun about puns, delivered by a man who made puns for a living, is among the most-cited meta-jokes in the tradition.

23. The Fancy Prose Style – Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

The narrator Humbert Humbert introduces himself with an adjective that does double duty: “fancy” meaning elaborate and “to fancy” meaning desire. A murderer who is also obsessively infatuated is announcing both his guilt and his pathology in a single grammatically ambiguous word. Nabokov called the pun not a trick but a moral instrument, and Lolita is constructed to demonstrate the claim across 309 pages.

Part VII: History’s Wild Cards

24. Peccavi – Catherine Winkworth, 1844– misattributed to General Sir Charles Napier

“Peccavi.”

The story goes that General Napier sent the one-word dispatch “Peccavi” after conquering the Indian province of Sind against orders – Latin for “I have sinned.” In fact, it was coined by the teenage Catherine Winkworth in a submission to a humor magazine, which mistakenly printed it as fact. A teenager’s pun was mistaken for military dispatches and entered the historical record. Winkworth never got the credit. Napier never made the joke. The pun survived them both.

25. The Jester and the Archbishop – Archibald Armstrong, Court of King James I, c. 1631

“Who’s fool now?”

Court jester Archibald Armstrong mocked William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury– the most powerful clergyman in England – at a court grace, in front of the king. Laud was notoriously touchy about his short stature. Armstrong’s punishment was to have his coat pulled over his head and be banished from the king’s service. History does not record the exact phrasing, but records the punishment in full, which is its own form of confirmation.

Part VIII: Five More Classics

26. We Must All Hang Together – Benjamin Franklin, attributed, 1776

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

After John Hancock declared that the signatories must “all hang together,” Franklin replied that they would otherwise hang separately – meaning execution by the British Crown for treason. The pun contains the entire stakes of the American Revolution in eleven words. Franklin was in fact prevented by the Founding Fathers from drafting the Declaration of Independence because they feared he would insert a joke. He inserted one anyway, at the signing.

27. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley, 1932– from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1611

“O brave new world that has such people in’t.”

Miranda speaks the line in The Tempest with innocent wonder at the shipwrecked men. Huxley repeats it three centuries later as the title of a dystopian novel about a world manufactured for compliance. The same words mean two opposite things depending on who is saying them. One of the most-cited examples of a borrowed literary pun transformed into its own opposite by a change of context alone.

28. A Knight There Was – Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c. 1390

“A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man.”

In the original Middle English, “knyght” (knight) was pronounced identically to “nyght” (night), drawing an immediate sonic parallel between the noble warrior and the darkness through which the pilgrims travel. Chaucer was among the earliest writers in English to use the pun systematically as a narrative instrument– predating Shakespeare by nearly two centuries and seeding the Canterbury Tales with layered wordplay throughout, from the high-minded to the aggressively bawdy.

29. The Lowest Form. The Highest Form. – Alfred Hitchcock, attributed– contra Samuel Johnson, disputed

“Puns are the highest form of literature.”

Hitchcock said this. The counter-claim – that puns are the lowest form of humour – is routinely attributed to Johnson, though researchers cannot locate it in his actual writings. One commentator notes that there is nothing snide in Johnson’s dictionary entry on the subject. The “lowest form” attribution may be the most famous misquote in the history of the form it is misquoting. Hitchcock, who built his entire career on things meaning two things at once, may simply have been more honest about his enthusiasms.

30. Great Mines Stink Alike – Flann O’Brien (as Myles na gCopaleen), The Best of Myles, c. 1943

“Great mines stink alike.”

Keats and Chapman spent months in County Wicklow prospecting for ochre deposits, sniffing it out. In a field of turnips near Avoca, Keats got the pungent effluvium of a vast ochre mine and lay for hours face down in the muck. Chapman found a second mine and implored Keats to confirm his nasal diagnosis. Keats lay down in the dirt and did his sniffing. “Great mines stink alike,” he said. The pun – great minds think alike – earns its place last on this list because it required the most work to arrive at. O’Brien spent an entire paragraph of perfectly constructed absurdist prose simply to make the reader eligible to receive it.

A Note on Attribution

Several attributions in this collection are contested– Twain, Churchill, Parker, and Franklin in particular attract puns they probably never made. Where doubt exists, it is noted. The puns themselves are not in doubt: they have been in continuous circulation long enough to belong to the language now, regardless of who first said them

.

Both takes were packed with elaborate O’Brien puns, which generated funny comments on social media and in some emails, leading to further research into what has been called the lowest, highest, and oldest form of humor. Happily (or sadly to some), the results are impressive enough to pursue an ongoing series on puns, starting with an overview and some of the most-quoted over time.

Samuel Johnson is usually cited (blamed) for originating the lowest form of humor slight. Alfred Hitchcock, who built entire films on double meanings, went the other direction, calling puns the highest form of literature. Both claims may be right, depending entirely on the pun.

To delve deeper and faster, I used multiple AI platforms to identify the most-cited puns in history, the legendary punsters, and the prevalent themes. This started with what was believed to be the oldest deliberate joke in Western literature, in Homer’s Odyssey (see below). The Bible dropped a few. Shakespeare bedeviled his critics with outrageous puns. Famous names include Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, and Lewis Carroll, among others

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I’ve included No. 1 to 16 in this Take 1 in the collection of 30 initial classics. After Take 2, you will be disheartened to learn I am working on a series of pun collections based on themes, starting with things not discussed in polite company, mostly (“The Pun at the Edge of Things: Death, God, and Sex”). As a former journalist, I am getting close to finding stars for “All the News That’s Fit to Pun: Headlines and Slogans.”

On to the discovery of the First 30.

Part I: The Ancients– They Started It

1. The Nobody Trick – Homer, The Odyssey, c. 8th century BC

“Help, nobody is attacking me!”

The oldest great pun in Western literature doubles as a survival strategy. Trapped in the Cyclops Polyphemus’s cave, Odysseus tells the giant his name is “Outis”– Greek for “Nobody.” When he blinds the Cyclops, Polyphemus cries out that Nobody is hurting him, and his fellow giants decline to help.

2. The Rock of Peter – Matthew 16:18, c. 1st century AD

“Thou art Petros– and upon this Petra I will build my church.”

“Petros” means a little stone, small enough to be thrown about. “Petra” is a big stone, big enough to serve as the foundation of a building. An entire religion’s institutional authority rests on a pun distinguishing rock size.

Part II: The Renaissance and the Bard

Shakespeare is estimated to have used over 3,000 puns in his plays. Samuel Johnson complained: “A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller! He follows it to all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, sure to engulf him in the mire.”

3. The Son of York – Richard III, Act I, 1592

“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”

The play’s most quoted opening line is, technically, a weather report and a family tree at the same time. The banter depicts an image of the sun and also refers to Richard as a member – or son – of the House of York.

4. A Grave Man – Romeo and Juliet, Act III, c. 1594–96

“Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”

Mercutio delivers this while bleeding to death from Tybalt’s blade. “Grave” means both a solemn person and the hole where a dead body lies. He is announcing his own death in a pun. It remains the most celebrated deathbed quip in the English language and one of the most-quoted lines in all of Shakespeare.

5. A Little More Than Kin – Hamlet, Act I, c. 1600–01

“A little more than kin, and less than kind.”

Claudius addresses Hamlet as both cousin and son. Hamlet’s reply, spoken aside, means: technically my stepfather, biologically unrelated, and entirely unnatural. “Kind” carries both familial feeling and biological category.

6. The Sole of the Matter – Romeo and Juliet, Act I

“I have a soul of lead / So stakes me to the ground I cannot move.”

Romeo puns on “sole” (the bottom of a shoe) and “soul” (the spirit). Written out the words differ; spoken aloud they are identical. Scholars note that most Shakespeare puns were composed for the ear, not the eye.

7. Making an Ass of Me – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, c. 1595–96

“I see their knavery: this is to make an ass of me.”

Bottom says this before becoming aware that his head has been transformed into a donkey’s. He is speaking literally and figuratively and does not know it. The dramatic irony compounds the pun: the joke is on the audience for laughing, and on Bottom for not.

Part III: The Metaphysicals and the Sacred Pun

8. Thou Hast Done – John Donne, “A Hymn to God the Father,” c. 1623

“When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done / For I have more … And having done that, Thou hast done; / I fear no more.”

Donne puns his own name (Done/Donne) and his wife Anne’s surname (More/Moore) into a devotional poem addressed to God. The puns accumulate across three stanzas: son/sun, done/Donne, more/More. Scholars debate it as either an act of profound spiritual intimacy or spectacular cheek– most likely both, based on different historical references from English Renaissance literature.

Part IV: The Victorians and the Play’s the Thing

9. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde, 1895

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

Wilde wrote an entire three-act play to deliver a single pun: “earnest” meaning both the name the characters pretend to bear and the quality of sincerity they conspicuously lack. Some sources say the title has been cited more often in academic discussions of puns than any other single work in English literature.

10. Immanuel Doesn’t Pun – Oscar Wilde, attributed

“Immanuel doesn’t pun, he Kant.”

A recursive pun – one in which the second meaning relies on understanding the first– applied to the philosopher Immanuel Kant. The joke works on sound (Kant/can’t) and on the philosopher’s own reputation for rigor.

11. Nothing Succeeds Like Excess – Oscar Wilde, attributed

“Nothing succeeds like excess.”

The received phrase being subverted is “nothing succeeds like success” – a Victorian platitude Wilde dispatched in four words by swapping one vowel. It is both a pun and a philosophy, and in Wilde’s case, historians say the two were rarely separable.

12. A Long and Sad Tale – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

“Mine is a long and a sad tale! – It is a long tail, certainly, but why do you call it sad?”

Alice confuses the Mouse’s “tale” for its “tail,” and the resulting poem – The Mouse’s Tale – winds down the page in the shape of a mouse’s tail. Carroll executes the pun simultaneously in speech, typography, and illustration - all three dimensions of the book.

Part V: American Wit– The Transatlantic Punt

13. Denial Ain’t Just a River – Attributed to Mark Twain

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

The pun has outlived its uncertain parentage to become one of the most universally repeated in the English language. Researchers trace it to a 1931 newspaper joke contest with no confirmed connection to Twain.

14. You Can Lead a Horticulture – Dorothy Parker, attributed, c. 1920s

“You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.”

Parker was challenged to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence and reportedly produced this on demand at an Algonquin Round Table lunch. The subverted proverb (“you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”) combined with the sound-alike double meaning has made this double-entendre pun one of the most cited in American literature.

15. The Wrath of Grapes – Dorothy Parker, attributed

“A hangover is the wrath of grapes.”

Three words subvert both the title of John Steinbeck’s book and the Biblical concept of divine punishment, applying both simultaneously to the morning after a party.

Scholars cited this as Parker at her most compressed: the pun, the social observation, and the self-portrait all arrive at once.

16. Under the Host – Dorothy Parker, attributed

“One more drink and I’ll be under the host.”

The swap of “table” for “host” manages to be both a social observation and a remark about desire: wit performing as confession (similar lines pop up occasionally in sketches on Saturday Night Live).

Next: Classic Puns 17 through 30.

Take 2 includes the Keats and Chapman puns, which have been shortened considerably from their sometimes long, twisting, and elaborate set-ups. To the delight of most punsters, they include a groaner or two. The Plain People of Ireland is Myles’ creative use of a question and answer and debate format, where he provides both (he also wrote letters to the editor under funny pseudonyms)

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Happy reading, and please share your favorite groaners in the comments so I can include them in a special future pun edition, with proper credit, of course!

The Keats and Chapman Puns

These shaggy-dog stories — elaborate fictional vignettes ending in a devastating pun — are widely described as among the most audacious in English comic writing. He called them “studies in literary pathology.” As one critic wrote, they accumulate fantasy to the point of sadism, and then cash home with the flat, desolating pun.

14. On Tour in France: Chapman once took a theatre company on tour in France, playing Molière. One night, the company’s scenery had to be conveyed by barge to a small village upriver from Paris. There was a frightful accident at the landing stage, all the stuff falling into the water. Chapman burst into tears. “For once I admire your mise en Seine,” Keats said. (Pun: “mise en scène” — the theatrical term for staging)

15. Stradivarius: Keats was once presented with an Irish terrier, which he humorously named Byrne. One day, the beast strayed and failed to return. Everybody was distressed, save Keats himself, who reached for his violin and was soon at work with wrist, jaw, and fingers. Chapman, looking in for an after-supper pipe, was astonished at the poet’s composure. “And why should I not fiddle,” Keats asked, “while Byrne roams?”

16. In the Coffin: Keats and Chapman were conversing one day on the street when there passed a character renowned for his piety — reputed to have already made his own coffin, erected it on trestles, and slept in it every night. “Did you see our friend?” Keats said. “Yes,” said Chapman, wondering what was coming. “A terrible man for his bier,” the poet said.

17. The Ochre Prospectors: Keats and Chapman spent several months in County Wicklow prospecting for ochre deposits. With Keats and Chapman, it was literally a question of smelling the stuff out. In a field of turnips near Avoca, Keats suddenly got the pungent effluvium of a vast ochre mine and lay for hours face down in the muck, delightedly permeating his nostrils with the perfume of hidden wealth. Chapman, too, found a mine. He implored Keats to come and confirm his nasal diagnosis. Keats agreed, lay down in the dirt, and did his sniffing. “Great mines stink alike,” he said.

18. The Warts Pun: One winter’s evening, Keats looked up to find Chapman regarding him closely. “I was thinking about those warts on your face,” Chapman said. “But they are rather a blemish,” Chapman persisted. “I wouldn’t mind one — but four fairly close together, that’s rather—” “Four?” Keats cried. “There were only three there this morning!” (Pun on “A stitch in time saves nine” — four warts in time saves three)

19. ‘She Stupes to Conquer’ — Fanny Brawne: Chapman thought a lot of Keats’s girl, Fanny Brawne, and often said so. “Do you know,” he remarked one day, “that girl of yours is a sight for sore eyes.” “She stupes to conquer, you mean,” Keats said.

Reference books note that this pun is triple-layered: a reference to Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to Conquer; “stupe” as archaic medical slang for a hot poultice applied to a wound; and “stupe” as plain Dublin vernacular for a fool.

20. ‘Carnival’ — The Debt-Ridden Church: Keats and Chapman once lived near a church. There was a heavy debt on it. The pastor made many efforts to clear the debt by promoting whist drives and raffles and the like, but was making little headway. He then heard of the popularity of carnivals, where you have swing-boats, roundabouts, fruit-machines, la boule, shooting galleries, and every modern convenience. He thought to entertain the town with a week of this and hoped to make some money to reduce the debt.

The carnival is duly installed, runs for a week, and raises a tidy sum — but not quite enough. A second week is announced. Keats and Chapman observe the proceedings with interest throughout. At the end, as the last of the machinery is packed up and the pastor counts the proceeds, Keats turns to Chapman. “A mercenary merry-go-round,” he said.

(Pun: the carousel going literally round and round; “mercenary” doing double duty as both profit-motivated and, by sound, mercilessly circular.

21. ‘A Man Called Dunne’ — The Dinner: Keats once met a man called Dunne and invited him to dinner. It happened that Dunne was a hefty, well-nourished party who usually ordered his steaks in pairs and spent at least 2 hours at the table every time he visited. He accepted the poet’s invitation and was thunderstruck to find himself faced with a mess of green herbs, with nothing else to relieve the greenery.

Dunne eats the herbs in silence, deeply affronted. He says nothing throughout the meal. Chapman, who has witnessed the entire proceedings with growing discomfort, asks Keats afterwards whether he thought the dinner a success.

“I thought it was well Dunne,” Keats said.

On The Plain People of Ireland

20. The recurring Greek chorus of incredulity: In Cruiskeen Lawn, Myles would often interject comments on the column itself from “The Plain People of Ireland” — a rather dense bunch of people who would ask him what he was going on about or criticise the writing. Myles would often take offence at this and break off the conversation. This device — in which Myles conducts a running argument with a fictional readership of Irish everyman skeptics — is one of the most original comic inventions in newspaper history.

“THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF IRELAND: What does that mean? MYLES: It means what it says. THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF IRELAND: But— MYLES: I’m busy.”

21. On the German Language:

Myles is wistfully recalling his student days in Heidelberg — beer, music, midnight swims in the Neckar, a German melody he half-remembers — when:

The Plain People of Ireland: Isn’t the German very like the Irish? Very guttural and so on? Myself: Yes. The Plain People of Ireland: People say that the German language and the Irish language is very guttural tongues. Myself: Yes. The Plain People of Ireland: The sounds is all guttural do you understand. Myself: Yes. The Plain People of Ireland: Very guttural languages the pair of them the Gaelic and the German.

The joke is in Myles’s surrender. He abandons the reverie entirely. The Plain People have won, as they always do, by being completely unstoppable.

22. “Is This Going to Be Long?”:

Myles periodically harangues the Plain People of Ireland, who come in to interrupt his flights of fancy with the challenge: “Is this going to be long?”

This recurring interjection — referenced across multiple critical assessments of the column — represents the Plain People at their most efficiently deflating. Myles might be mid-sentence on a point of philosophy, linguistics, or elaborate invention when the question arrives. It is unanswerable. It is also always the right question.

23. On the Column Itself — The Self-Referential Loop:

A representative exchange from this category — documented in multiple sources and widely quoted — has Myles mid-column on some elaborate point of language or culture:

The Plain People of Ireland: What does that mean? Myles: It means what it says. The Plain People of Ireland: Begob. Myles: Quite.

The power of the device, as the Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies noted in 2021, is that Myles seems very satisfied with his position — the ability to pontificate to the masses and critique the élites suits him well. He is in complete control of his situation and his persona. The Plain People exist to remind him, and the reader, that this control is entirely illusory

Miscellaneous gems from the column:

24. “Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses.” (The setup for the book-handling scheme covered in Take 1)

25. “The first beginnings of wisdom is to ask questions but never to answer any.”

26. “Rome wasn’t built in A.D.”

27. “In Boston, he met a pretty lady, fat and forty, but beautiful with the bloom of cash and collateral.”

28. “A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard — let’s emulate that wise old bird.” (Myles’s mock-sentimental recitation, used to deflate pompous discourse)

The most frequent references were to an Irishman whose name changed depending on who was telling the story: Flann O’Brien in the novels, Myles na gCopaleen in the Irish Times, and Brian O’Nolan on his civil service paycheck. I remembered having a copy of The Best of Myles, recommended by a good friend and humor historian in the UK some 30 years ago

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My copy of the book was properly mauled, with notes in the margin and references to other books (on mauling, this is taken from his running joke on a book-handling service. It concerns a newly-married wealthy friend who has filled his house with unread books purely for social credibility. O’Brien proposes a professional book-handler: “Why not a professional book-handler to go in and suitably maul his library for so-much per shelf?...You are spared the trouble of soiling and mauling it to give your friends the impression that you can read.”

For background, Brian O’Nolan (1911–1966) was born in Strabane, County Tyrone, the third of twelve children in an Irish-speaking household. He studied at University College Dublin, where he edited a magazine called Blather, an early sign of a career devoted to puncturing the self-important. He joined the Irish civil service in 1935, rising eventually to the position of private secretary to two government ministers — a fact that gives his later savagery toward the civil service a particular flavor of insider knowledge.

In 1940, the Irish Times offered him a column. He accepted, writing as Myles na gCopaleen — a name drawn from Irish, meaning roughly “Myles of the Little Horses.” The column ran, nearly daily, for twenty-six years under the title Cruiskeen Lawn — Irish for “little brimming jug.” He provided what many consider to be sustained comic invention without parallel in Irish journalism. Nothing escaped: the Gaelic Revival and its earnest enthusiasts, the Dublin theatre scene, the Irish parliament, the legal system, James Joyce (whom he admired and found insufferable in equal measure), and above all, “The Plain People of Ireland” — a fictional Greek chorus of baffled ordinary readers whom Myles invented to challenge, mock, and occasionally agree with him in print. He would then take offense and break off the conversation.

As Flann O’Brien, he also produced four novels that have never gone out of print: At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Hard Life, and The Poor Mouth — each one stranger and funnier than the last.

What follows is the first of two takes of my top 25 (1 through 13 here) from The Best of Myles and its companion volumes: one-liners, the famous book-handling scheme, and the Keats and Chapman puns. A word about those puns. They are elaborate and can often end badly. That is entirely the point. You have been warned. Enjoy!

1. On moderation and the Irish “Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.” Perhaps his most widely reprinted one-liner. A perfect specimen of the Myles style: deadpan, self-implicating, and devastatingly short.

2. On his own incorruptibility “It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale. I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was final and conclusive.” From The Best of Myles. A masterclass in the absurdist declaration of integrity.

3. On the English language and the Irish “If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England — and it would stop there only because it could go no lower.” A characteristic double insult — at Ireland and England simultaneously, with Irish nationalism smuggled in as the punchline.

4. On the theatre and talking “Often in the theatre I can hardly hear myself talking or assuring my doxy that so-and-so is the same fellow that played so-and-so in so-and-so, he’s very good, he’s a civil servant in the Department of Agriculture, I met a sister of his in Skerries, and so on. Actors should conduct themselves like the rest of us and practise the unobtrusive intonation of the gentleman.”

5. On Descartes “Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.” One of the most-shared single lines in all of O’Brien, regularly appearing on philosophy syllabuses and pub blackboards.

6. On life’s utility “Is it life? I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night’s porter when you are shivering with the red passion.” From the collected Myles na Gopaleen pieces. The escalation from philosophical complaint to the comically specific is vintage Myles.

7. On politicians “The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at a crossroads.” From The Hair of the Dogma (a companion Cruiskeen Lawn collection). One of his most-quoted political lines — still circulating in Irish political commentary today.

8. On the thrill of German grammar “Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.” Beloved by linguists, grammarians, and anyone who has sat through an 80-word German sentence.

9. On Joyce — with maximum impatience “I declare to God if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob.” O’Brien was simultaneously influenced by and contemptuous of Joyce’s cult status. This line appears across multiple columns and interviews.

10. On dusk “The dusk was performing its customary intransitive operation of ‘gathering’.” A favourite among literary critics — O’Brien mocking the purple-prose clichés of lesser novelists with a single scalpel stroke.

The Book-Handling Scheme (BUCHHANDLUNG) — from The Best of Myles

This extended comic routine, one of the most celebrated in the entire collection, concerns a newly-married wealthy friend who has filled his house with unread books purely for social credibility. O’Brien proposes a professional book-handler: “Why not a professional book-handler to go in and suitably maul his library for so-much per shelf? Such a person, if properly qualified, could make a fortune.”

11. The basic service offering The scheme elaborates across several columns into a tiered pricing system — from handling each book, to inserted random items as bookmarks (tram ticket, theatre program, claim check from the opera), to light dog-earing all the way up to the supreme tier:

12. The Traitement Superbe The Handling Superb, or “Le Traitement Superbe,” requires every volume to be well and truly handled by a master-handler with no fewer than 550 handling hours to his credit. Suitable passages in at least half the books are to be underlined in good-quality red ink and annotated with phrases from an approved list, including: “Rubbish!”, “Yes, indeed!”, “How true, how true!”, “I don’t agree at all.”, “Why?”, “Well, well, well.”, “Nonsense, nonsense!”, and the crown jewel — “I remember poor Joyce saying the very same thing to me.”

13. The forged inscription service For a little extra, the book-handler will supply a forged inscription in the owner’s favourite work — for instance: “From your devoted friend and follower, K Marx.” This led to his Myles na gCopaleen Book Club, to eliminate the bother of choosing your own books. There are no administrative irritations. “You just send in your guinea (a British gold coin of old), and you immediately participate in this great cultural uprising of the Irish people. We do the choosing for you, and, when you get the book, it is ready-rubbed, i.e., subjected free of charge to our expert handlers. You are spared the trouble of soiling and mauling it to give your friends the impression that you can read.”

This led to the Myles na gCopaleen Escort Service. His writers league found a horde of unemployed ventriloquists. They were trained to operate this new escort service. “Why be a dumb dud? Do your friends shun you? Do people cross the street when they see you approaching?... Supposing you are a lady and so completely dumb that the dogs in the street do not think you are worth growling at.” You meet your escort in the foyer of the theater. He greets you pleasantly. But you don’t answer. He does. “Your only worry throughout the evening is to shut up and keep shut up completely. The trained escort answers his own manly question and a voice far pleasanter than your own unfeminine quack, and gives answers that will establish astonish the people behind for their brilliance and sparkle.” Miles talks about the escort service spreading throughout Dublin. “If you are very dumb, you hire one of our ventriloquists doing accompany you in public places, and he does absolutely all the talking. The smart replies which you appear to make will astonish yourself as much as the people around you.” His horde of trained ventriloquists can be heard carrying out their single-handed conversations all over the city and “in the drawing rooms of people who are very important and equally ignorant.”

Next: Keats and Chapman, Puns Abounding, the Plain People of Ireland

· “Sometimes I actually left my house and went to events to write about them, almost like a real reporter, except I didn’t care about being accurate or fair or tasteful. I was doing investigative humor.”

· “Because these events were so weird, and because, as a humor columnist, I lied a lot, I would often feel the need, when I was writing about some ridiculous thing that actually did happen, to tell my readers, ‘I am not making this up.’”

· “(On proving a news story submitted by a reader about an abnormal occurrence of Rollerblade Barbie lighting fires, because her skates had flints like Zipper lighters and shot sparks) But in professional journalism we don’t just assume things. In professional journalism, we take a pair of our old underpants out to our driveway one evening and conduct an experiment wherein we apply hairspray to them to determine whether Rollerblade Barbie can set them ablaze…While they were burning, a neighbor walked over to see what was going on. And if you think it’s easy to explain why you’re squatting in your driveway over a pair of burning underpants, while holding a Barbie doll, then you—no offense—know nothing about professional journalism.”

· “On another occasion, I went on the show (David Letterman) to demonstrate that if you put a Kellogg’s strawberry Pop-Tart into a toaster, and you hold the lever down long enough, the Pop-Tart will catch fire and shoot flames several feet into the air.

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· “A column that always generated gotcha letters was when I wrote as Mister Language Person. This is a persona I invented who presented himself as the world’s foremost expert on grammar, punctuation and writing in general. Most of the column consisted of Mister Language Person answering questions, which I made up…The key attribute of Mister Language Person was that he was always wrong. He was spectacularly wrong. He was wrong about everything. He was often wrong three or four times in a single sentence. Virtually nothing he said was correct.”

· “I don’t know if the telemarketing people still hate me. But I like to think they do.”

· “At night I went to the Sheraton Wayfarer, a hotel in Bedford, where pretty much the entire national political press corps gathered at the bar to have a cocktail or three, discuss the political situation with other press corps members and—drawing on their vast storehouse of experience and knowledge—formulate the conventional wisdom, which would then appear in various forms in almost every newspaper in the nation, and which quite often was wrong.”

· “Myers is the White House press secretary, which means her primary responsibility in the briefing is to never reveal anything remotely newsworthy to the press.”

· “I drove to Derry to attend a jam-packed event for Barack Obama, who is surging ahead in the polls and is now basically a rock star. People were cheering, chanting, and throwing their underwear at him. And those were the journalists.”

· “We professional journalists are freaking out over the fact that no matter how hard we try to explain to the public that Trump is unqualified, a lot of the public keeps right on liking him and his bold vision for America consisting of whatever happens to cross his mind at a given moment.”

· “But I don’t think anybody can credibly deny that much of the established national news media, the big papers and networks, leaned anti-Trump in their coverage, in big ways and small (with central themes that he is uniquely corrupt and dangerous, an existential threat of Hitlerian magnitude).

· The problem with this argument is that when the public sees us taking sides—and the public definitely sees it—we lose the only reason we had any influence with the public in the first place: our credibility. We become just another partisan voice in a cacophonous chorus, one more basement blogger.”

MUSIC, ROCK BANDS, AND READER RAGE

· “(He wrote a column about songs that, when they come on the radio, make him want to immediately change the station. One of them was a Neil Diamond song, ‘I Am, I Said. To no one there, And no one heard at all, Not even the chair.’ It was a near-fatal mistake. His fans felt about Neil the way devout Christians feel about Jesus, only more passionately. He got thousands of irate letters, calling him an idiot, among other things. ‘My inbox was a seething pile of rage. Needless to say I felt terrible. No, I am joking again. I felt pretty good.

· The humor-columnist version of that saying is “When readers send you hate mail, they are writing your next column for you.”

· “I had hit a nerve; my readers were deeply passionate about this issue. So in my next column, I announced a Bad Song Survey. To this day, people still tell me about songs they hate. Also, there are still Neil Diamond fans who dislike me. But that is the price we sometimes must pay, in journalism, for pointing out inconvenient truths.”

· “(He had a running gag. He’d use a phrase, then observe, after the fact, that it would be a good name for a Rock Band - WBAGNFARB. Here are a few that might make the charts.)

Hearty Polyp Chuckles, Rival Bat Dung Gatherers, The Fecal Pellets, Heave, The Bones of Contention, Earl Piedmont and the Diphthongs, The Flaming Croutons, Rodent Passion, Flaming Squirrels, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Gaseous Worms, The Phlegmtones, Effluent, The Postal Patrons, The Vestigial Organs, Varlet and the Squeaking Codpieces, Violently Fracturing Water Closets, The Mighty Shaking Wattles, Marcel and the Turpitudes, Fugitive Squirrel, the Clearly Disturbed Beavers.”

POLITICS AND POLITICIANS

· “This is a recurring feature of presidential campaigns: politicians who have all kinds of solid qualifications, politicians who could undoubtedly do a competent job of being president, but who for various reasons—such as, in (Ruebin) Askew’s case, an almost life-threatening lack of charisma—fail to fire up the public.”

· “(At the Democratic National Convention) Meanwhile, out on the streets, large clots of people continue to barge around with signs demanding that somebody do something about something.”

· “Organized labor: Ronald Reagan should be placed in a dumpster and then it should be filled with concrete.”

· “Time was when the Democrats were no competition in terms of patriotism. They were always nominating their presidential candidates at three a.m. amidst clouds of marijuana smoke, and it was always somebody like George McGovern, who would make a speech where he’d call on Cuba to invade the United States, and for the closing ceremony they’d have Eldridge Cleaver spit on a Bible.”

· “But recently, Democratic Party officials detected a new surge of national pride caused by patriotic Olympics-related beer commercials.”

· “and it is a very, very important point, and I fully intend to make it if I ever get to the end of this sentence, which as you know and I know, Judge, is highly unlikely to occur during the current fiscal year, so…”

· “Sen. Thurmond: Soamwhoan ben cudrin’ mheah widm tan’ bfust drang. Translator: He says, ‘Somebody has colored my hair with what appears to be Tang breakfast drink.’”

· “Sen. Thurmond: Deah wheah etn lonsh yep?” Translator: He says, “Did we eat lunch yet?”

· Chairman Biden: “Thank you. May I just add that the top of my own personal head appears to be an unsuccessful attempt to grow okra. But, Judge, as soon as I make this one final point we’re going to let you go, because this has been very, very painful, and believe me I know what pain is, because at one time in my career I was the son of a Welsh coal miner, and let me just say, Judge, that when I do make this point, whatever it is, it will be something that I believe in very, very deeply, because I am the chairman, and I can talk as long as I want, using an infinite number of dependent clauses, and nobody can stop me.”

· “(Paul Tsongas being considered as the Democrats’ presidential nominee) Really. This is a man so low-key that he may be capable of photosynthesis, a man who makes Michael Dukakis seem like James Brown.”

· “To bear in mind when considering him as a potential president is that the letters in ‘Paul E. Tsongas’ can be rearranged to spell ‘Gaseous Plant.’”

· “When the Clinton campaign was faltering, party officials had Hillary abducted and taken to the top-secret Housewife Indoctrination Clinic, operated by Betty Crocker, where Hillary was subjected to thousands of hours of Ozzie and Harriet reruns and was given massive intravenous doses of Lemon Pledge. When she emerged she looked like the Old Hillary, but she was no longer shooting her mouth off about matters that frankly do not concern persons of the gal gender, such as the US government. When I caught up with the New Hillary, she was talking about cookies. This took place in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Hillary was host to a tea for the wives of Democratic congresspersons. She told the congressional wives that Family Circle magazine has gotten her into a contest against Barbara Bush to see who has the best chocolate-chip-cookie recipe. I am not making this campaign development up. Hillary told the wives to please vote for her cookie recipe, and they all applauded some more. Then Hillary started talking about the Clinton-Gore ticket, and her voice started getting forceful, and it appeared as though she was just about to bring up some actual issues when her Democratic handlers hit her with a tranquilizing dart, and the moment of danger was past.”

· “No, seriously, Sanders gave Clinton a strong endorsement. Granted, he had a pained expression when he did so, but he always has a pained expression. Even when he’s saying something upbeat, he looks like a man passing a kidney stone the size of a box turtle.”

I previously covered my favorite Dave Barry one-liners and zingers in three separate columns. Here is the first of those three that covered IQs of Bait, Fighting Gout, and Sheep Flying the Concorde.

He has written more than 30 books of domestic misadventure, travel, parody, and even fiction. This leads to this new Take 1 of excerpts from his latest book, Class Clown – Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. In this batch of memories, published at age 77, he ricochets from boomer childhood to colonoscopy prep, from small‑town Florida hangars to the frozen Dakotas, and from elementary‑school primers to Tupperware “instruments.”

BOOMERS AND AGING

· “You’ve heard this ad nauseam from us Boomers, but it’s true: Parents back then often had no idea where their kids were or what they were doing. The prevailing parental philosophy was that if the kids got home by suppertime without major injuries, all was well.”

· “For the record, I am in fact still alive, and I’m in reasonably good health for a man of seventy-seven. And when I say, ‘I’m in reasonably good health for a man of seventy-seven,’ I mean, ‘every single organ in my body is disintegrating.’ At least that’s my understanding, as a layperson, of what my doctors tell me. Like most old people, I have nearly enough doctors to form a softball team.”

· “…and of course a doctor who examines my prostate gland using what I know, on an intellectual level, is merely his forefinger, although in the moment—which seems to last as long as the Super Bowl halftime show—it feels as though he’s rooting around in there with a Louisville Slugger.”

· “I answer ‘no’ to all the questions on the Patient Health History Questionnaire, including ‘What is your address?’”

· “…now we read the ingredients on bottled water. Assuming we can find our reading glasses.”

SCHOOL AND CULTURE

· “I BEGAN MY EDUCATION AT Wampus Elementary, a public school that is still in operation, educating the youth of Armonk. (‘Wampus’ comes from the Native American word ‘wampus,’ which means, as far as I have been able to determine, ‘Wampus.’)”

· “My first reading textbooks were the famous Dick and Jane series, starring two wholesome-looking youngsters afflicted with some kind of nervous tic that caused them to speak like actors in the climactic scene of a porn movie: Dick said, ‘Oh, Jane. Oh, oh, oh.’ Jane said, ‘Yes, Dick. Yes, yes, yes.’ Dick said, ‘Ohmigod, Jane.’”

CITIES AND STATES

· “The point is that things have gotten way out of hand, and it does no good to dwell on whether the blame belongs to the good people of Miami, or to the low-forehead nose-picking yahoos of Orlando.”

· “We land in Bartow, which apparently consists of a hangar. Inside the hangar is a smallish agricultural crowd, which Graham, using his oratorical skills, immediately whips into a stupor. He is not a gifted speaker. He is the kind of speaker who, if he were not the governor, people would shoot rubber bands at after a while.”

· “I really liked Miami. It was hot and hectic, and it didn’t always feel safe, especially on the highways, where—I have long used this as a joke, but it’s actually true—everyone drives according to the laws of his or her individual country of origin.”

· “The truth is that when we think about North Dakota, which is not often, we picture it as having the same year-round climate as Uranus.”

· “Millions of tourists, lured by the word ‘South,’ flock to South Dakota every winter, often wearing nothing but skimpy bathing suits. Within hours, most of them die and become covered with snow, not to be found until spring, when they cause a major headache for South Dakota’s farmers by clogging up the cultivating machines.”

· “For nickname stupidity, no state challenges Indiana, which proudly calls itself ‘the Hoosier State,’ even though nobody has a clue what ‘Hoosier’ means. It could be a Native American word meaning ‘Has sex with caribou.’”

MUSIC, BANDS AND OTHER CULTURE SHOCKS

· “The other two instruments in the band are actually Tupperware products, played rhythmically by Tom and Lou, who also dance. How good are they? Let me put it this way: If you can watch them perform and not wet your pants, then you are legally blind. For one thing, they both are afflicted with severe rhythm impairment, the worst cases I have ever seen, worse even than Republican convention delegates.”

· “We may have drugs and we may have crime; We may have riots from time to time; We may be loud-mouthed rude city slickers; But at least we’re not low-forehead yahoo nosepickers!”

BODIES, BATHROOMS, AND OTHER INCONVENIENT REALITIES

· “(From his famous colonoscopy column) You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.”

MENTORS, FEAR, AND LATE‑LIFE WISDOM

· “(On his mentor) As you know, Art Buchwald spoke as though he had a family of hamsters living in his mouth.”

· “There will always be people telling you to be afraid, because sowing fear is profitable. There are whole industries devoted to scaring you; it’s the business model of most major world religions. Both major political parties raise millions of dollars by telling you that if the other party wins, we’re doomed. We journalists love to explain why you should be terrified. Yet life goes on. It did for my generation; it will for yours. So when the next Very Bad Thing comes along, and the winds of panic start to swirl around you, try to remember: It’s gonna be OK.”

· “Anyway, that’s the wisdom, such as it is, that I have accumulated over the course of my life, which as you may recall is the subject of this book. The book is almost over, although my life, as I type these words, is still going on. And despite the concerns of my softball team of doctors, I like to think it will go on for a while. But in the end everybody dies, with the possible exception of Keith Richards. So it’s only natural, when you get to be my age, to think about your own death. When will it happen? How will it happen? Will you die with dignity, wearing clean pajamas, or will you keel over on the toilet Elvis-style, in mid-poop?”

Next in Take Two:
Barry’s genius is that even when he’s talking about colonoscopies and caribou, you recognize your own country—and, disturbingly, your own body—in every punch line. Next: he leaves geography and gastroenterology behind, so to speak, and turns his attention to the people who cover politics, run for office, and write him furious letters.