Who Was The Greatest Wit?

[Hippias]

Who was the wittiest figure in the written or spoken word? Make your selections.

[Slavic Enforcer]

I voted for Churchill (the same could a Serb have had said about Croats :D ), Mencken is also not bad.

[Jake Featherston]

Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse would have been good choices.

[Barjag]

I am rather sapped for the night, and so opted to make my choice based on the most amusing quote in the selection.

P.S. A quip from Monica Piper just popped into mind: "A man on a date wonders if he'll get lucky. The woman already knows."

[Ahknaton]

I voted for Groucho Marx, because he's responsible for one of my favourite one-liners of all time:

"He make look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you... he really is an idiot"

I'm just talking wordplay here, there are other comedians who are more funny.

[tempus fugit]

Mark Twain is another good one.

[Geist]

Oscar Wilde by far. I respect all wits but I doubt any of them could hold a candle to Wilde at a dinner party.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

[Basil Fawlty]

Karl Kraus should be on this list, the great satirist of the Austro-Hungarian empire, piss-taker of Freud and his circle, mocker of Zionists, and all round great man of letters.

[Basil Fawlty]

Oscar Wilde by far. I respect all wits but I doubt any of them could hold a candle to Wilde at a dinner party.

He has no enemied ses, but is intensely disliked by his friends. One of my favourite Wildeisms (we are spoiled for choice).

Someone he disliked: "Oh Oscar, I passed your house the other night"
Oscar: "Good"

[cerberus]

Good subject .
Wilde - and Groucho - top men .:)

Oscar " I can resist anything but temptation" , he was educated just at Portora Scholl which is just an hours drive from me , when you are in the old scholl hall his name looks down on you and I am sure he was quite a rebel when he was there.
A close call between the two.
Mickey Rooney had another sharp line or two.
"Alimony , its liek putting gas in someone else's tank".

[Ahknaton]

Oscar " I can resist anything but temptation" , he was educated just at Portora Scholl which is just an hours drive from me , when you are in the old scholl hall his name looks down on you and I am sure he was quite a rebel when he was there.
That's in Inniskillin, right?

Denis Parker Burkitt (after whom Burkitt's Lymphoma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkitt's_lymphoma) is named) was educated there too. I only know this because my Dad wanted to visit Inniskillin on a self-directed "medical history tour", but no-one there had ever heard of him.

[Kamandi]

I'd pick lexicographer Samuel Johnson, Doug Kenney, or John Lennon. :)

[Aule]

Wilde. The others don't hold a candle.

[Kamandi]

Most - but not all - of Groucho's famous lines were written for him by comedy writers. In fact, Groucho himself admitted (and most who knew them agreed) that he wasn't even the funniest of the Marx Brothers off-camera; Zeppo was.

[il ragno]

Wilde. The others don't hold a candle.


London 1895... The residence of Mr Oscar Wilde.

(In WILDE's drawing room. A crowd of suitably dressed folk are engaged in typically brilliant conversation, laughing affectedly and drinking champagne)
PRINCE OF WALES: My congratulations, Wilde. You latest play is a great success. The whole of London's talking about you.
OSCAR: There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that it not being talked about.
(There follows fifteen seconds of restrained and sycophantic laughter)
PRINCE: Very very witty... very very witty.
WHISTLER: There's only one thing in the world worse than being witty and that is not being witty.
(Fifteen seconds more of the same)
OSCAR: I wish I had said that.
WHISTLER: You will, Oscar, you will.
(More laughter)
OSCAR: Your majesty, have you met James McNeill Whistler?
PRINCE: Yes, we've played squash together.
OSCAR: There is only one thing worse than playing squash together, and that is playing it by yourself. (Silence) I wish I hadn't said that.
WHISTLER: You did, Oscar, you did.
(A little laughter)
PRINCE: I've got to get back up the palace.
OSCAR: Errr….your Majesty is like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.
PRINCE: I beg your pardon?
OSCAR: Um... it was one of Whistler's.
WHISTLER: I never said that!
OSCAR: You did, James, you did.
(The PRINCE OF WALES stares expectantly at WHISTLER)
WHISTLER: Ahh... ..well, You Highness, what I meant was that, like a doughnut, um, your arrival gives us pleasure... and your departure only makes us hungry for more. (Laughter) Your Highness, you are also like a stream of bat's piss.
PRINCE: What?!?
WHISTLER: It was one of Wilde's, one of Wilde's.
OSCAR: It sodding was not! It was Shaw!
SHAW: I, I... I merely meant, Your Majesty, that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
PRINCE (accepting the compliment): Oh.
OSCAR Right. (To PRINCE) Your majesty is like a dose of clap. Before you arrive is pleasure, and after is a pain in the dong.
PRINCE (Loudly): WHAT?
WHISTLER and OSCAR: One of Shaw's, one of Shaw's.
SHAW: You bastards..!. Err, um... what I meant, Your Majesty, what I meant...
OSCAR: We've got him, Jim.
WHISTLER and OSCAR: Come on, Shaw-y.
SHAW: I merely meant...
OSCAR: Come on, Shaw-y.
WHISTLER: Let's have a bit of wit, then, man.
SHAW: (Blows raspberry; the PRINCE shakes SHAW's hand. Laughter all around)

[kultron]

I can't believe no one has mentioned Voltaire.

[Kamandi]

Or Jonathan Swift.

[Warka]

I have nothing to declare but my genius. -- Wilde

[sugartits]

Dorothy Parker and Mencken.

"If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it." -Parker

[Ixtab]

Samuel Johnson is the first that comes to mind.

[Burrhus]

One vote for for our very own Court Jester, the incomparable, Hachiko.

[Crowley]

Other: Samuel Johnson

[Odysseus]

I voted Groucho but I would've voted Churchill too if I could've: I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly = lulz.

[Zubenelgenubi]

There are some great wits up there, but after much consideration I had to go with Wilde. What decided it for me was the fact that only Wilde had it in him to muster up witty last words: Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.

[Johnson]

Wilde is vastly overrated. Something to do with the west's fascination with fags trying to be cute and coy, I guess.

Mencken sweeps all wit awards.

[Dan Dare]

Churchill was a master at the withering put-down of pompous fools, as for example, recounted here by David Irving in Churchill's War. Vol. I:

...Churchill and Ribbentrop met occasionally, at social functions like a
dinner given by Lord Kemsley. Their dislike was mutual and profound. "If
Germany gets too big for her boots," bragged Churchill at one embassy
luncheon, "she'll get another thrashing."’

Ribbentrop crowed that this time they had the Italians on their side.

"That's only fair,"’remarked Churchill, puffing at his cigar. "We had
them last time."

[Macrobius]

John Owen -- 12 books of Epigrams in English and Neo-Latin

http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/owen/contents.html

[Geist]

Wilde is vastly overrated. Something to do with the west's fascination with fags trying to be cute and coy, I guess.



Considering his reputation as a wit was already affirmed whilst he languished in prison for homosexuality I imagine this is not the reason.

[von Sternberg]

That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding. The limpid and spiritless vacuity of this intellectual jelly-fish is in ludicrous contrast with the rude but robust mental activities that he came to quicken and inspire. Not only has he no thought, but no thinker. His lecture is mere verbal ditchwater—meaningingless, trite and without coherence. It lacks even the nastiness that exalts and refines his verse. Moreover, it is obviously his own; he had not even the energy and independence to steal it. And so, with a knowledge that would equip and idiot to dispute with a cast-iron dog, and eloquence to qualify him for the duties of a caller on a hog-ranche, and an imagination adequate to the conception of a tom-cat, when fired by contemplation of a fiddle-string, this consummate and star-like youth, missing everything his heaven-appointed functions and offices, wanders about, posing as a statute of himself, and, like the sun-smitten image of Memnon, emitting meaningless murmurs in the blaze of women’s eyes. He makes me tired. And this gawky gowk has the divine effrontery to link his name with those of Swinburne, Rossetti and Morris—this dunghill he-hen would fly with eagles. He dares to set his tongue to the honored name of Keats. He is the leader, quoth’a, of a renaissance in art, this man who cannot draw–of a revival of letters, this man who cannot write! This little and looniest of a brotherhood of simpletons, whom the wicked wits of London, haling him dazed from his obscurity, have crowned and crucified as King of the Cranks, has accepted the distinction in stupid good faith and our foolish people take him at his word. Mr. Wilde is pinnacled upon a dazzling eminence but the earth still trembles to the dull thunder of the kicks that set him up.

Ambrose Bierce in Wasp, 1882.

A lyric also appeared in this edition of The Wasp, possibly written by Bierce:
There was a sweet infant named Wilde
A precious and crystaline child;
While sucking his playthings,
However he’d say things,
That proved that his mind was defiled.

Bierce was not apologetic for his excessively harsh criticism of Oscar Wilde. He wrote in the following week’s edition of The Wasp:
“To the many aggrieved correspondents and the few lachrymose personal friends who have done me the honor to protest against my ungentle–or as most of them prefer to say, ungentlemanly–rhapsody on Oscar Wilde, and who have made the novel suggestion that abuse is not criticsm, I beg to answer thus: 1. This is not a journal of criticsm. 2. In Mr. Wilde’s lectures there is nothing to criticise, for there is nothing of his own..."

[President Camacho]

Gotta cast my vote for the Sage of Baltimore.

Everyone should read this Mencken article in full, one of my favorites:

The Libido For The Ugly (http://www.bizbag.com/mencken/menklibid.htm)

I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N.J. and Newport News, Va. Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles. But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical. One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them.:rofl:

By the way, if anyone has the pleasure to travel through South Central/SW Pennsylvania, to this day there are STILL plenty of examples of these grotesque habitations.

[Julian Curtis Lee]

Groucho Marx? Please. Just crude Jewey jokes. Awful.

Winston Churchill? And no Mark Twain? :confused:

[Ixtab]

The choices are too narrow.

Where, for instance, is Samuel Johnson? As a conversationlist of extraordinary wit and sagacity he is too distinguished to be neglected. Hundreds of Johnson's most lively conversations are carefully recorded in Boswell's Life of Johnson.

http://raote.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/samuel-johnson.png