Embrace, subvert, transcend
Or, how to send a witty telegram
Texting has emojis. Zoom has wacky backgrounds. TikTok has dance challenges. Yo has, um, Yos. Every new communications technology offers new venues for surprising creativity.
Consider the lost art of telegram wit. Once humans figured out a way to communicate via dots and dashes, we devised a way to sharpen those points. And when you survey the wittiest telegrams ever sent, it becomes apparent there are three ways to master a new way of communicating.
1. Embrace the format
The telegraph made globalization a thing. With instant, long-distance communication, the world became much smaller. You could share news in real time — even if it was just news to you. When Robert Benchley arrived in Venice on his first-ever trip to Europe, he cabled this to Harold Ross, his editor at the The New Yorker:
STREETS FULL OF WATER — PLEASE ADVISE
And of course, you could use it for short-distance communication as well. When the playwright George S. Kaufman attended one of his musicals and saw an actor mangle the lines, he snuck out at intermission to send this telegram to the tongue-tied thespian’s dressing room:
AM SITTING IN THE LAST ROW.
WISH YOU WERE HERE.
2. Subvert the format
By the mid twentieth century, the telegram had been around for several lifetimes. People were used to its power — as well as the brevity it required. When you only have 15 words, niceties get dropped. A magazine editor was exceptionally brief when he telegraphed this fact-checking message to Cary Grant’s agent:
HOW OLD CARY GRANT?
The actor, who hated to divulge his age, intercepted the message and responded:
OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?
3. Transcend the format
Of course, the best telegrams were so good, it didn’t matter that they were telegrams. These are the pithy remarks that can be easily repurposed, such as this note that Dorothy Parker sent to congratulate a friend on the birth of her first child:
WE ALL KNEW YOU HAD IT IN YOU
Or this poem that Irving Berlin cabled Groucho Marx on the occasion of his 71st birthday:
THE WORLD WOULD NOT BE IN SUCH A SNARL
HAD MARX BEEN GROUCHO INSTEAD OF KARL
And so the best advice is: just be transcendent, no matter the medium. Hope that helps!
Quick quip; lightning
“UNABLE OBTAIN BIDET. SUGGEST HANDSTAND IN SHOWER.”
— Billy Wilder, in a telegram to his wife that hit all three categories.
That was the 70th issue of Get Wit Quick, your weekly guide to one-and-done liners STOP. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting can be read at a bus STOP. The STOP gag is a telegram classic. Reading fake congratulatory telegrams in bad accents is a great wedding speech fallback. Tap, tap, tap the ❤️ below, please!