Wit's End

What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It

By: James Geary

Narrated by: David de Vries, JD Jackson, Janet Metzger

Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

"A witty book about wit that steers an elegant path between waggishness and wisdom." -Stephen Fry

Much more than a knack for snappy comebacks, wit is the quick, instinctive intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place. In this whimsical book, James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Geary reasons that wit is both visual and verbal, physical and intellectual: there’s the serendipitous wit of scientists, the crafty wit of inventors, the optical wit of artists, and the metaphysical wit of philosophers.

In Wit’s End, Geary embraces wit in every form by adopting a different style for each chapter; he writes the section on verbal repartee as a dramatic dialogue, the neuroscience of wit as a scientific paper, the spirituality of wit as a sermon, and other chapters in jive, rap, and the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. Wit’s End agilely balances psychology, folktales, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, drawing upon traditions of wit from around the world.

Entertaining, illuminating, and entirely unique, Wit’s End demonstrates that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.

Full production copyright: 2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Excerpt from Dan Burley’s Jive by Dan Burley, reprinted with permission from Northern Illinois University Press. © 2009 Northern Illinois University Press. Excerpt from Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics, and Other American Heroes by David Isay and Harvey Wang. © 1996 by David Isay. Photos © 1996 by Harvey Wang. Foreword © 1996 by Henry Roth. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

©2019 James Geary. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Unexpected treasures

This book is not at all what I thought. At first I was disappointed because it didn’t meet my expectations, but I ended up really enjoying it. Truth be told, I thought I was going to learn to be funnier and wittier. I am at least smarter about the history of wit and I picked up some fun tricks with games to sharpen the mind, including the unfair lesser value we assign to puns. (Puns are highly underrated). I quite enjoyed learning how puns are a brilliant literary device when used across languages. Chapter 9 was my favorite because he talks about the Trickster archetype and across cultures, which I found super interesting. It was almost a Reference book, in some ways, but chock full of great stories.

I love the book

I would recommend this book to anyone looking to increase their wit by means of analysis of wit itself.

What i would like from this book is more actionable steps towards becoming wittier. However with the information provided, an individual can develop strategies for themselves.

Nothing funny about this guy's wit

This book is boring analysis without even a sprinkling of humor. A book about wit should be entertaining

A true delight

This was a great book to listen to. The puns and performance work well together.

Disappointing

Have no real insight.

The gimmick of “illustrating” the theme of the chapter by changing the style was very irritating.

Reading the footnotes is terrible

Having the narrator read all the footnotes was incredibly annoying. The book reads like a scholarly article