I only read the first few chapters of this book and, while the descriptions of the humor and various people's opinions of the importance of "wit", the book was rambling. I had no idea where he was going with all of the opinions expressed or even if the chapters were really essays by different people.

In the circle of friends I grew up with, being called witty was about the highest praise one could receive. We never bothered to define the term precisely, but rather understood that it implied a degree of cleverness and facility with language that went well beyond just being funny. So, what exactly is wit, how does it work, and why does being considered witty matter so much to us? Those are precisely the questions that James Geary attempts to answer in Wit’s End, his exhaustingly researched and frequently engaging treatise on just about every imaginable aspect of the topic.

At the simplest level, the author explains that wit can be regarded as a kind of metaphor: two disparate concepts connected by a commonality in sight, sound, or thought are combined for an incongruously comedic effect. Take puns, for example, such as the title of the 1970s rock album ‘You Can Tune a Piano but You Can’t Tuna Fish’. (Incidentally, this is not one of the dozens of puns that Geary cites, but it has been a personal favorite for a long time now.) The book then expands on this basic theme with chapters detailing how wit can be found in everything from literary fiction to fine art to popular music to religious tracts to political discourse.

It deserves mention that the author himself is very clever in how he presents this analysis—the chapter on witty verbal banter is written as the script for a stage play, he offers the section on how wit works on the brain as a scientific research paper, visual wit is treated as an art history lecture, and so on. That structure, along with the thorough way in which the subject is documented across time and tradition, is what I found to be most compelling about Wit’s End. On the other hand, I also caught myself wondering at times in my reading whether this was really too narrow of a topic to justify a volume-length treatment. I am not sure that question was ever resolved, but I did come away from the experience both amused and enlightened!