You’re crossing the street as a car approaches at full speed, skidding to a stop just before the crosswalk. The driver yells out the window, “take your sweet time, buddy!” You know you’re in the right here. You should say something back. You rack your brain for the perfect comeback, but nothing comes…
We’ve all been there, shaking our metaphorical fists at our minds, pleading, “don’t just sit there, you idiot!” When we think of wit, we often think of contrived punchlines or verbal gymnastics (think: one-liners or puns). But, in his book “Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It,” journalist James Geary argues that wit isn’t just for cunning linguists.
Rather, the building blocks of wit are things we can practice to become quicker on the dialogic draw.
At its core, wit is all about connections
People we consider witty are the ones who can quickly make unusual connections between words, ideas, and things that are happening in the present. Quartz notes that it’s the unexpected nature of these observations that delights us as an audience.
“[W]it consists in binding together remote and separate notions, finding similarity in dissimilar things (or dissimilarity in similar things), and drawing the mind from one word to another,” says Geary.
And while various artistic formats (standup, improv, rap) act as a container for wit, it’s the snap synthesis of disparate concepts that creates comedy.
What makes some people wittier than others?
We have two regions in the brain to thank: the caudate nucleus and the frontotemporal region. The caudate regulates the ability to shed our inhibitions and engage in divergent thinking, while our frontotemporal region helps us access our vocabulary and personality — both crucial in making those unusual connections.
In other words, when we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, we often don’t say anything. And if we don’t take time to enrich our vocabulary and broaden our interests, we simply have a smaller quiver of clever combinations to draw from.
That doesn’t mean Oscar Wilde was born with a “jacked” frontotemporal lobe…
It just means he exercised it a lot. As we write time and time again, we can think of our brain as a muscle: the more we exercise these regions of the brain, the more quick-witted we can become. Conversely, when we stop being curious about the world, these synapses atrophy.
It’s easy to let our brains get soft in isolation — especially the creative parts. So, consider this a nudge to keep reading, keep playing, and, above all, keep being curious.
