The Wit's Guide to Coffee
Or, damn fine stinking Puddle Water
Coffee really gets you going — but going where? Consider this fascinating finding of NASA scientists in the 1990s: Caffeinated spiders make the stupidest webs. To wit:
The good news, as I’ve reminded readers in every issue since this newsletter began in 2019, is that we are not spiders. Caffeine probably developed as a natural insecticide, which explains why it leads spiders to create asymmetrical webs filled with gaping holes. Humans are of course too smart to create such a deeply flawed world wide web. But maybe it’s time to switch to benzedrine.
“I like my women the way I like my coffee: detrimental to hippocampal neurogenesis, but conducive to short term memory and attentional control.”
— Steven Kaas
Too much coffee can trigger existential angst: All that focus and jitteriness is for what, exactly? That was the joke of Too Much Coffee Man, an indie comic hero from the 1990s. And more recently, it’s the ongoing weird Twitter account Coffee Dad, whose decade of regular tweeting about his need for coffee is occasionally interspersed with enigmatic expressions of searing grief. But the best coffee angst line of all time is the one depicted on June’s Riposte Card, which I will mail to you posthaste if you subscribe today:
“What would life be without coffee? But then, what is life even with coffee?”
— Louis XV of France
Coffee isn’t so much the gas in the car of the capitalist economy as the break fluid. What other drink do many employers provide for free and then offer you paid time off to consume? If you instantly thought kombucha, you may still be working at a startup in 2013.
“Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank."
— Alphonse Allais
The horrible endgame of our caffeinated dystopia was best described by the prophet Frank Sinatra in The Coffee Song, which describes how an excess of coffee beans in Brazil led that nation to ban all other liquids, to the point that “coffee pickles way outsell the dill” and (to put a hat on a hat) they “put coffee in the coffee in Brazil.” Chilling stuff.
“I put instant coffee in a microwave and almost went back in time.”
— Steven Wright
Whenever you hear people say they hate coffee, it’s natural to assume they’re doing it wrong. In 1674, an English “Petition Against Coffee” referred to its subject as “a base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking Puddle Water.” There remains an awful lot of bad coffee out there, as you realize when you’re lucky enough to taste the good stuff.
“The best coffee in Europe is Vienna coffee, compared to which all other coffee is fluid poverty.”
— Mark Twain
If you really need a coffee, you probably aren’t so picky. When George Orwell was on the front in the Spanish Civil War, he recalled a dirty tactic used to rouse soldiers: “A rumour—one of those mysterious rumours that are endemic in war—flew round that hot coffee with brandy in it was about to be served out.”
In fact, his unit was about to be sent on a perilous nighttime mission. There was no coffee to be had and, eventually, the bad guys won the war. Caffeination does not imply causation, but why take the chance?
“I went out the kitchen to make coffee – yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men.”
— Raymond Chandler
All hail July’s Riposte Card artist!
I’m delighted to share that July’s Riposte Card will be illustrated by the effervescent Erika Sjule, a cartoonist whose work regularly appears in The New Yorker and on her excellent Substack, wherein she details her process. I’ll share the cartoon I commissioned from her on behalf of my 33 lovely paid subscribers next week, but in the meantime here’s a sentiment which: Yes!
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“I like my women like I like my coffee — in a plastic cup."
— Eddie Izzard, who also likes her coffee covered in bees
This newsletter and five dollars will get you a cup of coffee, but then what will you read while you drink it? Save your cash and invest in one of the following five-dollar words:
Get Wit Quick No. 208 will wait out coffee’s fourth wave and go straight to the fifth. We should all aspire to enjoy anything as much as FBI Agent Dale Cooper enjoys his damn fine coffee. If this newsletter is a weekly shot, then Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is the samovar from whence it brewed. Tapping the ❤️ below is the Substack equivalent of latte art.