The Wit's Guide to Housework
Or, don't bother
Wits don’t do housework because housework is the opposite of wit. Wit is spontaneous, surprising, and fun. Housework is routine, predictable, and dull. It’s more interesting to turn a phrase than to turn down the beds, so someone else needs to do the dirty work.
“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.”
— Quentin Crisp
It should come as no surprise that a keyword search of The Quotable Hitchens finds no mention of housework, chores, ironing, tidying, sweeping, mopping, or domestic life. The closest you’ll find is an unappetizing retort to someone who called him a slob:
“Those who know me will confirm that while I may not be tidy, I am so clean you could eat your dinner off me.”
— Christopher Hitchens
Bertie Wooster employed Reginald Jeeves to take care of the mechanics of everyday life. Technically a valet wouldn’t do housework, but that distinction is strenuously ignored in P.G. Wodehouse’s stories. Jeeves is often “fooling about in the background on some job or other” or “messing about in the next room with forks and so forth,” but this is immaterial. As Bertie observes, it “beats me sometimes why a man with his genius is satisfied to hang around pressing my clothes and what-not. If I had half Jeeves's brain I should have a stab at being Prime Minister or something.”
“Housework can’t kill you, but why take the chance?”
— Phyllis Diller
Dissatisfaction with pressing clothes and what-not helped power first-wave feminism, and the evolution of Phyllis Diller’s one liners are a case in point. The comic got her start writing a household hints column in a local newspaper and soon recognized that, since no man deigned to talk about householdery, she had a rich vein of material. The Smithsonian has digitized Diller’s gigantic card catalog of gags, and there are more than 2,000 on ironing alone. “You haven’t lived til you’ve had hot gin out of a steam iron,” reads one.
As the scholar Kathryn Kein notes, most of Diller’s jokes are about how bad she is at keeping house:
“They won’t even sell me a copy of Good Housekeeping magazine. They’re afraid it might be seen in my house.”
“I use a lot of imagination in my cooking. I imagine it’s delicious.”
“I’m such a lousy housekeeper that even the white pages in my phone book are yellow.”
And only a precious few underline the fact that the problem wasn’t her skill but the sheer drudgery of the tasks. She just didn’t want to do it:
“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.”
If you think hard enough about housework, you can think your way out of it. Peg Bracken does this in the The I Hate To Housekeep Book, the sequel to her bestselling The I Hate to Cook Book and the rare guide that, per historian Margaret Horsfield, “has never been bettered for dry humor or practical ideas.” Bracken identifies the “spotless housekeeper” who just won’t stop, the “spotful housekeeper” who just won’t start, and the occasional housekeeper, “whose book this is.” Bracken asks her readers to ask themselves:
Who, or whom, are you keeping house FOR?
Ideally it’s for yourself, because if “things get too cluttered you won’t be able to think straight” to do other, better things. It definitely shouldn’t be for friends and neighbours. The logic is simple: If you are cleaning up because guests are coming over, consider that a truly gracious host keeps a messy home so their guests may feel superior.
“If their windows are shinier than yours are,” she writes, “it will make them feel all warm inside, and they’ll like you for it.”
“The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
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“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”
— G.K. Chesterton
This is one of my all-time top quips, so much so that I plan to write a series of interactive stories called Choose Your Own Inconvenience. But before I do, I ask you to kindly set me off on next week’s adventure:
Speaking of…
The Wodehouse Shimmer
The Diller Hustle
GWQ No. 165 only dusted the parts you were sure to see. If you ever have the opportunity to mix up “light housekeeping” with “lighthouse keeping,” take it. And ask yourself: Who, or whom, are you reading Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting for? Why not brush that speck of dust off the ❤️ below?
After reading this I can finally relax* thank you Benjamin!
* not really as I still can't find anything but I'll work on that next
We need these epiphany moments, thank you.