Staircase wit of world history
Or, how the Incas discovered aviation
You never get a second chance to reject first contact. But in Laurent Binet’s clever new novel Civilizations, the indigenous people of the Americas turn back their European visitors. After securing both herd immunity and smelting knowhow from early Viking explorers, the Incas humiliate Christopher Columbus and conquer Europe, with a little help from Machiavelli.
I’ve been a sucker for a good alternate history ever since reading Robert Harris’s 1992 novel Fatherland, in which a 1960s Berlin detective figures out how the Nazis won the war. (Unfortunately, Nazis run rampant in this genre, ruining it as they do everything.) Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union gave alternate histories literary cred, and every tech giant trying to get a streaming service off the ground has done so with a counterfactual drama: Amazon filmed Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, while Apple TV+ let the Soviets win the space race in For All Mankind.
But the real history of alternate histories can be traced up the wit of the staircase, or l’esprit d’escalier. This idea was coined by a frustrated Denis Diderot, who only thought of the right thing to say at a Paris dinner party while descending the stairs toward the exit. In modern times, it’s George Costanza thinking of the comeback “well, the jerk store called and they’re running outta you!” only after being humiliated at a seafood buffet.
But it’s the Germans who turned the idea of afterwit into a historical genre. Their word treppenwitz was originally a straight translation of Diderot’s staircase wit, but then the 1882 book Treppenwitz of World History: Historical Errors, Distortions, and Inventions took it in another direction. Author William Lewis Hertslet’s examples were tragic ironies or confusing outcomes that were later reinterpreted to make some sort of sense. It’s hard to find clear examples, though it seems like Dick Cheney being celebrated by Democrats on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives might qualify.
And how about turning deep historical ironies into clever wordplay? Aaron Sorkin did this reasonably well in Being the Ricardos, as Lucille Ball convinces her husband that she should skip his band tour and take a major film part recently vacated by Rita Hayworth:
LUCY Who’s the baseball player you talk about? The one that sat down and let Lou Gehrig—
DESI Wally Pipp.
LUCY —start that streak? Gehrig was his understudy.
DESI Backup.
LUCY And the guy took a rest one day and Gehrig came in and didn’t come out for forty years?
DESI Fourteen years and it was Wally Pipp.
LUCY Okay, well, imagine if Wally Pipp had scheduling problems and Lou Gehrig, instead of grabbing his glove, toured with his husband’s Latin orchestra. It would’ve changed the course of baseball.
DESI And the course of Latin music.
That alternate history joke is an echo of this great line from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, in which the character Henry reflects on the day the music died:
Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
Beethoven flying biplanes over a Europe ruled by Incas and scored by Lou Gehrig’s husband’s Latin orchestra — as unlikely as it sounds, it’s precisely the sort of thing you should go back up the stairs and explain to the hosts of that dinner party you just left.
Quick quips; lightning
“History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.”
— George Orwell
“With history one can never be certain, but I think I can safely say that Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs. Khrushchev.”
— Gore Vidal, after being asked how things would have been different if Nikita Khrushchev had been assassinated instead of JFK.
“People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.”
— G.K. Chesterton
Speaking of...
Snappy comebacks
Accidental wit
The history books will remember this as the 132nd issue of GWQ. I have this memory of Bob Dylan saying that anything that rhymes must be true, but I can find no proof he ever said that. Similarly, Mark Twain never said history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. There is no blanker verse than the one I used to write Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Sports betting is always the saddest time-travel timeline. If you’d do it all over again, tap the ❤️ below.