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The keyword in this article title is "witty." Witty does not mean deep, sententious, or profound. Mother Theresa, Abigail Adams, Jane Austin, George Eliot, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Rachel Carson wrote quotable prose, but stand-up comics they were not. Humorous writers they also were not.

One more distinction: Gracie Allan and Lucille Ball were hilarious in their delivery of comic material written by others. There is no evidence that either was particularly witty in ordinary conversation or personal correspondence. With Carol Burnett we are entering the realm of wit. Sure, she has joke writers, but much of her funny stuff emerges in impromptu exchanges with her audiences.

Asked to comment on her growing up years, Burnett produced a zinger of a metaphor: "Adolescence is just one big walking pimple." On becoming a mother: "Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head." That is wit.

America is gifted with marvelous female stand-up comedians and columnists. In years past, Tallulah Bankhead cracked us up by describing herself as "pure as the drivn sluch." Erma Bombeck comes close to being a female Dave Barry. Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller can be rib-splittingly humorous, but neither is quite a Robin Williams or George Carlin. I don't see any contemporary woman with the constant and dependable cleverness of Dorothy Parker, journalist, poet, short story writer, and Algonquin Round Table wit.

Raised in Manhattan by a Jewish father and a Protestant stepmother (her birth mother died when Dorothy was 5) she was sent to a Catholic high school. Her caustic wit had already emerged. She was expelled from school for defining the Immaculate Conception as spontaneous combustion.

Later, describing her drinking, she delivered the following quatrain:

I really love my martinis,
But two at the very most.
After three I am under the table.
After four I am under the host.

To sum up her cynical view of the world, she wrote in 1937:

Oh life is a glamorous cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

Assigned by Vogue to write an article about the Yale Junior-Senior Prom, she was overheard to murmur as she looked at the tuxedoed Yale students and their glamorously attired dates, "If all the sweet young things here tonight were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised." And why wouldn't she deliver this in a low voice? She always said, "A girl's best friend is her murmur."

Some of her best known

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