The Wit’s Guide to Luck
Or, socioeconomic residue
They say you have to be lucky to be good and good to be lucky, which is clever if it’s true but maybe not true if it’s clever. And by “they,” I mean sporting types, as they have more occasion than most to ruminate on luck. It’s the residue of design, said baseballist Branch Rickey, whose excellent name is itself a great mix of what you start with and what comes your way.
“It is best never to have been born. But who among us has such luck? One in a million, perhaps.”
— Alfred Polgar
Sifting through the accumulated wisdom on luck, one’s eyes start to swivel about the paeans to hard work and sacrifice. They begin to seem like a willful ignorance of socioeconomic status, reminiscent of Molly Ivins’ observation that George W. Bush was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. (More baseball!) Luck is owning a farm and having your roosters lay eggs, goes one expression — but first you have to own the farm. (Also, when this happened in Jurassic Park, it was very unlucky.)
“I am always in my mind waiting for some bell to ring that never rings, for some wonderful thing to happen that never happens. I try to show myself that luck follows work as harvest comes by ploughing: deep down I have never believed it; I cannot believe it; I cannot make myself believe it.”
— Stephen Mackenna
Here’s a hypothetical: You are reading this newsletter on the bus when suddenly it (the bus, but also the newsletter) jumps the curb, flips upside down, and bursts into flames. You are gently catapulted through an open window, effortlessly pirouette through the air, bounce on a backyard trampoline, and comfortably land on your feet. What astonishing luck!
But here’s an even better hypothetical: You never get on that doomed bus in the first place. You have a perfectly normal day with no traumas to speak of. Isn’t that even luckier? Or as George Orwell reported from the battlefields of the Spanish Civil war:
“No one I met at this time — doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients — failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”
So much of wit — thinking of the right thing to say at the right time to the right person — feels like luck. If you talk all the time, do you increase your odds? It’s like buying all the lottery tickets to ensure you win: effective but not economical. Tallulah Bankhead is the operative case study here: She never stopped talking and said a few clever things as a result. But that also led one wag to observe that “a day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country.”
“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”
— Iris Murdoch
Most luck is bad. I base that assertion on this chart from Lapham’s Quarterly, which shows that use of the word luck peaks when the economy is down and slumps when the good times are rolling. Good luck doesn’t factor into our well-deserved prosperity, but sometimes bad luck gets in the way.
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
— Cormac McCarthy
When we try to explain why things happen the numbers never quite add up, so we include the amorphous quality of luck into the equation. And it really doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. The physicist Niels Bohr hung a horseshoe over his door, a decorating choice that one visitor found odd for a man of science. But as his host explained: “I have heard it said that a horseshoe can bring good luck even to people who are not superstitious.”
“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?”
— Jean Cocteau
Every week, there’s a ReccoMention!
If you’re in the right place at the right time with the right socioeconomic status, you might have a chance at making artistic history. The details therewith are revealed below in this week’s ReccoMention, available exclusively to my Paid Subscribers each week.
Every month, there’s a Riposte Card!
Each month, I use the precious funds sent my way by Founding Subscribers to commission a new artist to illustrate a new quip. I then mail the resulting postcards to the aforementioned Founding Subscribers, delivering a monthly dollop of delight for a scandalously low annual price. I love them all equally, especially these ones. If you love any/all, just subscribe at the Riposte Card level for only C$80/year and I’ll mail ‘em to you.
Quote Vote
“He is so unlucky that he runs into accidents that started out to happen to someone else.”
— Don Marquis
Clearly, we’ve got to find the place where all the accidents come from and thoroughly fumigate it. What shall next week’s newsletter investigate?
You know who really find rabbit feet to be lucky? Rabbits. If Get Wit Quick No. 241 wasn’t magically delicious, better luck next time. You need profound luck to find my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting in a Little Free Library, but slightly less luck in a Big Free Library. Tapping the ❤️ below is at this point more of a lucky custom than an algorithmic hack, but I’m sure Neils Bohr would do it if he were here.
I’m remInded of an old blues tune with the line: if I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.