The quickest possible quips
Or, microdosing wit
Of course brevity is the soul of both wit (Shakespeare) and lingerie (Parker) but how short is too short? You should get to the point but only to a point.
Naturally it’s the poets who have tried to crack this microscopic nut, a nut so small it’s a nit. Aram Saroyan took the prize, according to the Guinness Book, with the world’s shortest poem. Pictured above, it’s the letter m with an extra hump.
In his book Absence of Clutter: Minimal Writing as Art and Literature, Paul Stephens runs through all possible explanations for Saroyan’s untitled m with a modicum of oomph. It might be:
A direct reference to the M&Ms logo, what with “the bold rectangular feet” and all;
The exclamation “mm,” defined by the OED as used to express pleasure, approval, or uncertainty;
The contraction for millimetre;
Textspeak for nevermind;
The abbreviation for the state of New Mexico;
Or an allusion to the first words Molly Bloom speaks in Ulysses, “-Mn”, in response to her husband asking “You don’t want anything for breakfast.”
It is “a minimum level of denotative content with a maximal range of allusive reference.” More practically, it’s the kind of work Stephens was allowed to use to teach a class called Twentieth-Century American Literature and the Visual Arts at a maximum-security prison, as all his art history textbooks were banned for depicting nudes.
The works Stephens taught fell into the uncanny valley between art and literature: The artists thought they contained too many words, whereas the writers believed they were made to be seen and not read.
Saroyan especially aimed to “make a poem that would look good on a billboard,” with attempts like
eyeye
The space between eyes, this poem was emblazoned on a tote bag Paul Stephens brought into his prison class. The students “immediately noted the poem was a palindrome, and that the poem was a homophone for ‘I,I’ as well as ‘aye, aye.’” Also it was stereoscopic, as it looks back at your two eyes with two eyes. And it works in Spanish as “ojojo.” I’d call that a good day in the clink.
lighght
This was one of the first recipients of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and as such became a conservative flashpoint frequently used by Ronald Reagan. The basic complaint: “We can’t afford to lower taxes but we can pay some beatnik weirdo $500 to write one word…and not even spell it right?!” Which I’d sum up with this one-worder: (g)rant
eatc.
Maybe a good name for a minimalist all-you-can-eat restaurant? All-you-can’t-eat?
Anyway, we’re looking for the atomic unit of wit and Saroyan is down in the quantum realm, pushing quarks around the page with a spudger. He crafts admirable setups but it’s BYO punchline. All of which suggests the real key to a witty one-word poem: More words. Bob Grumman’s lively tour of mnmlst poetry offers some satisfying more-word poems; here are three gems so small they’d make a jeweler loop the loupe:
“the day”
un + s = up;
up - s = un.
— LeRoy Gorman
“On the Antiquity of Microbes”
Adam
Had ‘em— Strickland Gillilan
“Sign With Letters Obliterated by Mud”
Ark
In
Ear
— Karl Young
And finally, the great Ogden Nash’s “Reflection on Ingenuity”:
Here’s a good rule of thumb:
Too clever is dumb.
Quick quips; lightning
“Good things, when short, are twice as good.”
— Tom Stoppard
“I will be so brief I have already finished.”
— Salvador Dali, giving the world’s shortest speech
“The notion of expressing sentiments in short lines having similar sounds at their ends seems as remote as mangoes on the moon.”
— Philip Larkin, sliming rhyming
Speaking of…
Writing short STOP
Minimal outputs
Get Wit Quick No. 153 was the first issue on brevity since No. 17, and there’ve been plenty of words between. Aram Saroyan’s daughters are named Strawberry and Cream. As Strawberry wrote to Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter Apple in 2004, “you may come to see your name as part of a larger picture of what your parents were trying to do, and one that will add multitudes to your life.” Fruit daughters ftw! Gotta give the Bible credit for “Jesus wept.” My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting doubles as a collection of 55,000 one-word poems. Tap ❤️, pls.