by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: December 11, 2008   Last Updated: October 11, 2010

The keyword in this article title is "witty." Witty does not mean deep, sententious, or profound. Eleanor Roosevelt said, "A woman  is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot  water." That is profound, but it doesn't induce laughter. Instead you nod your head and think about strong women in hot water. Mother Theresa, Abigail Adams, Jane Austin, George Eliot, 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 Gracie was particularly witty in ordinary conversation or personal correspondence. Lucille Ball admitted that she wasn’t very funny off camera. 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.

Tallulah Bankhead cracked us up by describing herself as "pure as the driven slush." 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 sense rising anger in the female audience, but wait!  Dorothy Parker - journalist, poet, short story writer, and Algonquin Round Table wit - ranks with the topmost level humorist and commander of English of either gender. Would that there were a time machine that could place Parker in a room with Samuel Clemens. The verbal byplay would be priceless.

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.

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