Des MacHale

A curation of witticisms. Possibly even a well-curated one. It's separated into categories and everything!

It's hard to talk about the content of a book that's entirely a collection of other people's wit. When it comes to quotes, you want something short and zippy that pushes the right cognitive synapses, which means it has to be familiar and come from somebody famous.

One-liners also need to trigger a hugely dense amount of familiarity, which means they have to resonate with beliefs and tropes already contained within the reader, ideally deeply and with much resonance.
This is what troubles me about the book.

I don't want to blame the author for the sayings of people who have come before him. But it's interesting how starkly social values are expressed when you read the same barbs in witticisms over and over and over.
Lawyers are to be hated and ideally killed.
There is nothing valuable about wives (and maybe they ought to be killed too.)
Ideal women are dim sluts, and best kept that way.

That kind of thing. It's the kind of dissonance I can't really overcome, because while this book isn't intentionally political, the idea of keeping these tropes around bothers me. There are plenty of quotations inside the book that are complex, self-directed, masterwork quips ... but they're surrounded by better and worse repetitions of themes I really hope we don't carry into the future. The quip as a lightning bolt of humour quickly became a harrowing vision of how poorly mob mentality can become be when primed with the right sayings over and over and over.

I really appreciated the gems in the book, and honestly some were so smart and cutting (and usually historical) that I'd be able to tolerate them ... but not surrounded by hundreds of repetitions on a theme that, if coming out of anyone I knew, would be horrible indeed. It's hard to enjoy this this in an uncritical collection, and it makes me ache for collections that can manage the wit and even the malevolence contained within, but as something that confronts my witticism centres and isn't just fodder to warm the tents that hold my echo chambers.

This book excels an archive of how ugly humanity, as displayed by its common witticisms (a.k.a. deferring our thought to the amazing pinnacles of others) ... but I look forward to this book being a very unattractive one in our future world.… (meer)

A collection of puzzles that are meant to be solved by "lateral thinking" -- that is, by questioning your natural assumptions and coming at things from a different angle.

There are really three different kinds of puzzle here. First, there are straightforward riddles or logical puzzles, where you can figure out the answer just from the information given in the question and the common knowledge in your own head, either by careful reasoning or by chewing it over until insight suddenly dawns. For me, these were far and away the most fun. While a few were familiar, there were plenty I hadn't seen before, and some of them were quite clever and entertaining and made for great exercise for the brain. (Here's one for you: "The day before yesterday Freda was 17. Next year she will be 20. How can this be so?")

A few were really more trivia questions than anything, with answers that probably you either know or you don't, and which I imagine most of us would be unlikely to be able to guess. (Example: What was the first man-made object to exceed the speed of sound?)

The majority, though, describe some odd, unlikely, or even seemingly impossible scenario and require you to figure out the explanation or the backstory. (E.g.: A man is lying dead in a field, with an unopened package next to him. What happened?) The authors recommend approaching these as a group activity, where one person knows the answer and the others get to ask yes or no questions until they figure it out. Not having a willing group of people around, I didn't get the full effect of these, I'm afraid, and the clues provided for those of us playing on our own were often either useless or too much of a giveaway, and were seldom the questions I wanted answered, anyway. I'm sure it is more entertaining to do it properly, but, well, I do actually remember doing a couple of them that way in college, thanks to a housemate who must have either had a copy of this book or one much like it. And my recollection is that it was fun for a little while, then quickly got frustrating, and that the answers, when revealed, provoked less of an "Aha!" reaction and something more along the lines of, "How the hell were we ever supposed to get that?" A lot of the answers in this collection -- not all of them, by any means, but a lot -- elicited a similar reaction from me. And several, frankly, seemed like cheats even when you're expecting a sneaky answer. Still, some of them were moderately nifty and reasonably guessable.

This volume, by the way, is actually a compilation of three books: Lateral Thinking Puzzlers, Challenging Lateral Thinking Puzzles and Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles. I'd say the first one was the best. By the time they got to the third volume, the authors seemed to be running out of creative ideas; half the puzzles in it are little more than re-purposed urban legends.… (meer)