The Wit’s Guide to Excuses

Or, bad explanations

New fruit who dis?, Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1512

All excuses are bad. If an excuse is good, we call it an explanation.

Are they worth it, then? The adage “A bad excuse is better than none at all” is said to date back to the very first English language comedy, Ralph Roister Doister from 1550. The fact that we remember neither play nor proverb is a sign of something.

“The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving any excuse.”
— Jules Renard

Do you ever need an excuse to tell a Shaggy Dog Story? These long elaborate jokes feature a butt in the form of the listener, patiently waiting for the punchline. The Shaggy Bear Story is a distant cousin that requires a setup featuring one character from Prague, one character from another nation, and a pair of bears. The characters go into the woods, have an unfortunate encounter with the local megafauna, and eventually one forensic investigator says to the other, “the Czech is in the male.” In this age of e-transfers and digital currency, that may be the only form in which that classic excuse lives on.

“Loafing needs no explanation and is its own excuse.”
— Christopher Morley

If you’ve read this far, you need one excuse that passes for an explanation, so here it is: When you’re pulled over for speeding, explain that you were not aware of how fast you were going. This ingenious eight-dimensional mind trick is reported to work 26% of the time, while asking for a warning — with or without an excuse — works 36% of the time. Explaining that you’re bringing home hot food and didn’t want it to get cold only works 11% of the time, presumably because the police know about microwaves. 

“Ignorance is no excuse, it’s the real thing.”
— Irene Peter

Honesty is the best policy and the worst excuse, because no one will excuse it. Consider William Carlos Williams’ 1938 poem This Is Just To Say, explaining that he ate all your plums in your icebox  because “they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold.” He was first and best savaged by the poet Kenneth Koch in 1962, wherein the speaker chops down a house (“it was morning, and I had nothing to do / and its wooden beams were so inviting”), poisons plants (“I simply do not know what I am doing.” ), and breaks your leg (“I was clumsy and / I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!”) 

“The usual excuse of those who cause others trouble is that they wish them well.”
— Vauvenargues

Is there any excuse for poetry? Flann O’Brien argued no. “Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life,” he wrote under the pen name Myles na Gopaleen. 

And most of it is bad: “No one is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable.” 

And it metastasizes: “One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies.” 

And, per William Carlos Williams: “Moreover, poets are usually unpleasant people who are poor and insist forever on discussing that incredibly boring subject, ‘books’.”

 “Excuse me, my leg has gone to sleep. Do you mind if I join it?”
— Alexander Woollcott

But there is an excuse for literature, and it’s the greatest of them all. By this I am of course referring to the dog that ate the homework, an actual canine that once devoured an actual classic.

“Minor tragedy stalked. I don’t know whether I told you,” John Steinbeck wrote to his editor Elizabeth Owen in 1936. “My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my book [Of Mice and Men]. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a [manuscript]. I’m not sure it is good at all.”

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16 beautiful excuses to send me money

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Quote Vote

“Providing for one’s family as a good husband and father is a watertight excuse for making money hand over fist. Greed may be a sin, exploitation of other people might, on the face of it, look rather nasty, but who can blame a man for ‘doing the best’ for his children?”
— Eva Figues

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That was issue No. 260 of Get Wit Quick, so if you brazenly assume there are 52 weeks in a year and accurately estimate that there’s been a new issue every single week, that means this rickety jalopy has been chugging merrily along for five whole years. No excuses! The newsletter grew out of my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️  below and say the devil made you do it.