The Wit's Guide to Friendship
Or, disasters changing colour
In the annals of witty friendships, you’d be hard pressed to find a better pair than Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Their mostly irreplicable secret: Collaborate early and equally on a creatively and financially successful project.
“Carl Reiner isn’t the best friend I ever had — he’s the best friend anyone ever had.”
— Mel Brooks
The two comedians met in their 20s and soon after turned a dinner-party joke called The 2,000-year-old Man into a series of Grammy-winning comedy albums. The gag about old age — Brooks played the ancient sage who would answer Reiner’s straight-faced questions — started funny and became true, as Brooks and Reiner remained close into their 90s, dining and watching Jeopardy! together every night.
“My God, the thought of being without him — the world would be too bleak!” Reiner told The Guardian in February of 2020, a few months before his death at the age of 98.
“There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
Mutual admiration is the glue of lasting friendship, but sometimes you end up sticking your fingers together by mistake. The improbable acquaintance of Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot could have been one of the twentieth century’s oddest friendships. The poet wrote a fan letter to the comedian in 1961 asking for a photograph, beginning a correspondence that continued until the two dined together in 1964. But the more they got to know each other, as Lee Siegel writes, the more Marx’s prickliness and Eliot’s pomposity came to the fore.
“Money can’t buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy.”
— Spike Milligan
Marx initially replied with an out-of-costume photo, looking more like 🙂 than 🥸. Eliot insisted on Classic Groucho and said he hung the photo in his study. Marx came across a profile of the poet that mentioned Eliot’s art collection but not the picture, and pointedly asked about it. Eliot replied that it must have been an oversight.
“My best to you and your lovely wife, whoever she may be,” Marx signed off one of his letters.
“My lovely wife joins me in sending you our best, but she didn’t add ‘whoever he may be’—she knows,” Eliot responded.
“My best to you and Mrs. Tom,” Marx wrote back, adding that “All male cats are named Tom—unless they have been fixed.”
They ate their last supper together through gritted teeth, as Groucho told his brother Gummo: “I was not going to let anyone—not even the British poet from St. Louis—spoil my Literary Evening.”
“A well-made dry Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.”
— M.F.K. Fisher
Wit can occasionally help a friend in need, as Owen Wilson demonstrated in a letter to The New Yorker in 2005. The magazine had run David Denby’s somewhat condescending profile of his pal Ben Stiller, and Wilson struck just the right note of self-effacing irritation in response:
“I've acted in two hundred and thirty-seven buddy movies and, with that experience, I've developed an almost preternatural feel for the beats that any good buddy movie must have. And maybe the most crucial audience-rewarding beat is where one buddy comes to the aid of the other guy to help defeat a villain. Or bully. Or jerk. Someone the audience can really root against. And in Denby I realized excitedly that I had hit the trifecta.”
“Given a friend to listen, my own disasters change color. I win victories while relating them.”
— Ben Hecht
For the case against life-long bonhomie, consider the perspective of Ben Hecht, the writer behind Hollywood’s classic screwball comedies. “Our friends vanish with the events that produce them,” Hecht writes in his excellent memoir A Child of the Century. “I look back on a hundred friends, each of them a fellow who once seemed a vital part of my day and is no part of it now.” While he says that “we must grow old on an emptying stage, and in a corner of it, usually,” Hecht insists this is not a bad thing:
“I, for one, have never regretted vanished friendships. They are like money happily spent.”
— Ben Hecht
But who wouldn’t rather have money happily in the bank? The Brooks-Reiner ideal remains, and as Brooks wrote in his recent memoir All About Me!:
“If you don’t have anyone in your life like Carl Reiner, stop reading this right now and go find someone!”
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“A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.”
— Arnold Bennett
As my close personal friends, I lean on you to guide this newsletter each week. In the past, you’ve steered me toward heartbreak, boredom, and death. Thanks?
Speaking of…
Mel & Carl
Anti-friends
After 183 issues, Get Wit Quick has an almost preternatural feel for the beats of your inbox. Groucho Marx didn’t stoop so low as to tell T.S. Eliot that his name was an anagram for toilets. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting isn’t an anagram. Tapping the❤️ below is a rough digital approximation of a friendly wave.
This was great, I have been a spendthrift at times, I hope to make up for that and may I never die broke.
"Heart" as friendly wave! Love it.