How To Cultivate Wit And Be Witty
There is a secret to turning communication into play.
Have you ever had the perfect quip or comeback after it didn’t matter? This could happen at any moment, a minute, an hour, or even a day after the conversation ended.
It’s called l’esprit de l’escalier, or spirit of the staircase. It refers to the perfect retort but it occurs at the wrong time.
For people that are trying to be witty, this happens a lot and it can eat at the very soul. However this doesn’t mean you are doomed to sit by as you hear other sharp and witty banter. All it takes is a matter of practice.
Practice at being wittier, improving reaction times and your skills at landing a jab or joke at the proper moment.
All of these things are outlined by James Geary in his book Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It. It was released in November 2018 and Geary argues that wit isn’t just designed for those gifted linguists.
We can all strive to be clever as language is meant to be played with. It’s not always meant to be for mundane communication. Adding wit into conversations can make life and the exchange less boring and more fun for both you and others around you.
Here is how you can do it.
Train Your Cognition
Practicing and mastering wit means being able to learn and turn your words and phrases around in your mind and present new juxtapositions. The wittiest people in the room are going to be the people who can make the most unusual connections between words and ideas.
For example, in a recent marketing meeting with my team, I joked how I disliked the term “serial entrepreneur”. Personally, it’s a pointless title. But then, I came up with the idea that if anyone ever tells me they’re a serial entrepreneur I’d respond with:
“Oh, so you work at General Mills or something? How is that treating you?”
These kinds of unusual connections provide refreshing elements of surprise to observations that cause us to smile or wince from the listener.
It also reinforces how access to associations, both conscious and unconscious, are crucial parts to being witty.
Some people won’t be able to make this connection at all. Geary states in his book people who experience brain damage or have neuropsychiatric diseases lose their ability to make these associations at all.
In milder cases, there are people who suffer from witzelsucht, a German term meaning “wit sickness” or “wit addiction”. This results in a compulsion to make jokes that are usually socially inappropriate.
What matters in the end with all this is that witty thinking requires a unique configuration. It needs our neural processes to engage in seemingly contradictory modes of thought. It needs to be:
- Spontaneous
- Deliberate
- Generative
- And evaluative
In other words, your brain needs to be able to link ideas in a creative way and is capable of evaluating those connections thoughtfully and presenting them in an unexpected and clever combination.
How To Become Witty
Even with all of this said, you don’t need to wait for some breakthrough in brain science to cultivate wit. Knowing that wit isn’t just a spur of the moment and is actually an associative process alone makes it easier.
Wit doesn’t always come in the form of a quick quip. It can manifest in several ways:
- Puns
- Rhymes
- Metaphors
- Slang
- Rap
That’s only a few of them. But those all require practice and like everything else, it can be mastered. Here are some things to be keeping in mind when being witty:
- Wit is borne of knowledge. So the richer vocabulary you have, the better.
- Curiosity is another important element. So read up on language in various ways. Pop music, fiction, scientific writing, slang. The more curious you are in discovering these things the easier it is to generate unusual combinations.
- Aside from Geary’s book, the history of wit is a pretty blank slate. There isn’t any text that delve into linguistic cleverness or analyzing how it happens or why we rely on it. The only thing of note is the most iconic and oldest texts in the world (Tao Te Ching, the Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays, amongst many others) are filled with language play.
- Wit has been used as a political tool too, subverting censorship. For example, the #MeToo movement in China required it. They used the hashtag #RiceBunny and emojis of rice and a bunny to signify discussion of sexual harassment without alerting censors of sensitive topics. In China, the words ‘rice bunny’ are pronounced as ‘mi tu’ in Mandarin.
- Wit can be used to break down barriers between generations and countries. Think of famous worldwide bands.
- At the same time, wit can reinforce boundaries, keeping out humourless or people who aren’t familiar with the ling and in the know. It’s efficient to say more with less or to expose unexpected meanings.
With so much communication overload, wit is an antidote to that culture. It requires wisdom and more cleverness than the angry and hatred reactions we see on social media.
Perhaps developing this skill more and deploying it there can lead to some better times on social media.
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