How Wit Reveals the Trickster Beauty of Our Garbage World

Illustration of woman laughing and crying with inverted woman frowning and crying.
James Geary’s “Wit’s End” explains how the concept, equal parts Darwinian and Deconstructionist, promises elasticity and attunement in a time in which meanings don’t stay still.Illustration by Eleanor Davis

We live in the dumbest timeline. And yet the world is full of wit. Wit, fully understood, is not simply a knack for puns and banter—it’s “the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time,” writes James Geary, in his new book, “Wit’s End.” Your breath is wit, warming your hands and cooling your soup. A door is wit—it is entrance and exit, beginning and end. Tears are wit, suggesting both tragedy and joy.

That there is a trickster beauty to reality’s mechanics is the unlikely takeaway of “Wit’s End.” “Human life . . . is equivocal, two-faced, duplicitous,” Geary writes. Wit—that eerie quick flair, an almost clairvoyant fitted-to-circumstance-ness—sees ambiguity and mines it; it becomes a strategy for negotiating doubleness with grace. Wit, equal parts Darwinian and deconstructionist, promises elasticity and attunement in the garbage world of 2018, where meanings don’t stay still.

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Geary, who is the deputy curator at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, covers scientists, inventors, philosophers, painters, and poets. He designates the lowly pun as the kernel from which all other forms of wit grow—puns, he proposes, are “compressed detective stories,” yoking strange associates together. One “solves” them as one might lay bare a conspiracy—what do gorges and gorgeous have in common? (Per a municipal motto, Ithaca is both.) “Wit’s End” sometimes treats these devices the way Freud treated dream images: as supercharged particles, burls that mark the convergence of multiple trains of thought. And it pins such condensation as a feature of wit more generally. Cézanne layered multiple frames of reference on a single canvas—his apples are at once fruit and pure geometry.

Geary is a keen storyteller, promiscuous with quotes and figures. One could do worse at a cocktail party than simply opening his book at random and reading aloud. (The average number of puns in a Shakespeare play is seventy-eight. A pun that spans multiple languages—behold the haute dog, a genteel frankfurter—is called “macaronic,” from the Latin word for “medley.”) The book also matches the style of each chapter to its theme. A section on repartee is staged as a dramatic dialogue between Denis Diderot (who coined the phrase “l’esprit d’escalier”) and Anne de Stael-Holstein, an Enlightenment philosophe. In a faux art-history lecture, Geary explores the visual wit of trompe l’oeil painters. (Joseph Jastrow’s “duck-rabbit” illustration—a pun for the eye—is typical of their double vision.) Occasionally he falters badly: his “Hamilton”-inspired rap contains the line “Wit. It’s the shit. Wit. It’s so lit.” For the most part, though, the formal shifts playfully enact the notion of wit as “improvisational intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place.”

Yet something about this subject matter remains elusive. What makes a comment witty? The poet Alexander Pope chalked it up to style: “True wit is nature to advantage dressed; / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” Perhaps a bon mot is a universal understanding plated with panache—a kind of caffeinated knowledge that informs, confirms, and jolts awake. This would accord with Geary’s sense of the witty observation as one that disturbs our perceptual routines by drawing latent meanings to the surface. But wit is also serenity in the face of the absurd. It is sageness crowned with levity, what Aristotle meant when he spoke of “educated insolence.” The term “eurtapelia,” which Aristotle defined as being full of “good turns,” recurs throughout Geary’s digest. The book calls upon this faculty as it swerves from point to point, from the critic Arthur Koestler’s “bisociation” theory of creativity to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s related concept of the bricoleur, the collage artist. Medieval healers believed that threads of power bound similar things together: an herb shaped like a kidney could cure renal disease; a hair from my head might give you influence over me. Wit may not be sorcery, but it does open a trap door to wisdom: to E. B. White’s “heightened truth,” the full graininess of experience. It forces us to notice, to question, like the man at the stadium who wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. And then it hit him.