The Wit’s Guide to Rarities

Or, marmalade vs caviar

Portrait of a Fool, Frans Verbeeck, c. 1550, rare both for its black background and use of the pregnant man emoji.

In the contest between marmalade and caviar, what’s the spread? The Wit’s Guide to Rarities pivots on this question, because it all comes back to this quip:

“Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.”
— Noel Coward

Is this true? Doesn’t it depend on how bon the mots are? Isn’t too much of a good thing wonderful? Everything in moderation, even including trenchant observations that lead to new ways of thinking? And can we trust a man who was afraid of Christmas in French? 

“Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.”
— William Hazlitt 

In his madcap 2016 autobiography Gone With The Mind, Mark Leyner recalls celebrating his mother’s recovery from surgery “at Raoul’s in SoHo in New York City, and she asked the waiter if there was a discount on the caviar for people who’ve recently had brain tumors.” The waiter says he’ll check with the kitchen, but extra toast points are all he can manage.

“Chocolate Cokes in high school are better than caviar on a yacht when you’re forty-five.”
— Eve Babitz

Leyner admires her optimism, as though “it’s possible that Raoul’s might be running some sort of unpublicized hemangioblastoma- all- the- caviar- you- can-eat promotion.” He then recalls “cringing with mortification when my dad asked for coarse-cut Seville marmalade at a fucking Denny’s in Nebraska. I mean, would you ask for an ortolan drowned in Armagnac at KFC?”

“I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges.”
— D. H. Lawrence

The ultimate proof of Coward’s theorem may have been the heyday of Twitter, when producing clever quips seemed like the whole point of the thing. It was like drinking marmalade by the pint! 

To remedy this, an app called WitStream promised to curate the whole mess with an eye toward comedy. It was licensed to a number of media properties for “second screen” events like the Super Bowl, with the pitch to “stop listening to your unfunny friends try to make jokes and leave the funnymaking to the professionals.” Curated caviar! Of course it failed, another example of the gatekeepers being trampled as the crowds knock down the gates. 

The result brings to mind the writer Craig Brown’s description of the Royal Variety Performance, an annual event which an olio of entertainers share a stage for an effect that’s “almost hallucinogenic, as though all the celebrities of any given year had been thrown into a pot, boiled down and merged in a particularly gooey sort of celebrity marmalade.”

“All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”
— Baruch Spinoza

Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov had one of the twentieth century’s great literary feuds, a high point of which came when Wilson accused Nabokov of having an “addiction to rare and unfamiliar words.” Responded Vlad: “It does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey; that is his loss.” Born in St. Petersburg, Nabokov was most certainly a caviar man.

“I was perhaps twenty-three when I first ate almost enough caviar.”
— M.F.K. Fisher

Fisher’s famous phrasing is probably the best way to think about caviar and wit. Of all the delicacies of the world, sturgeon eggs were her absolute fave. On the few wonderful occasions when she had as much as she liked — three copious servings, more than she could possibly finish, an endless amount — she described the experience as almost enough. Maybe get another tin, just to be sure.

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Every week, a ReccoMention 

The writer Jan Morris defined “Marmaladeness” with a capital M as a dark and tangy national talisman of Englishness. This week’s ReccoMention for my admirable paid subscribers is a bit more of Morris:

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Every month, a Riposte Card 

Every month I ask the talented artists I commission to make clever postcards with your subscription dollars (subscribe now!) what they most like to spread on toast. Would you believe that not a single one of the first 12 respondents has asked for either marmalade or caviar? 

I’ve heard cheese (“an old cheddar or a creamy havarti ideally”), “a smidge of butter with a nice drizzle of honey,”  “whipped ricotta with honey/berries,” “obviously butter,” and “More like what is wrong with people eating toast and not putting a plate under it?”

But the best answer to date is probably the most decadent: “One gold bar,” via

Chip Zdarsky

:

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Quote Vote

“I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast any time.’ So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.
— Steven Wright

What glorious treats shall we be spreading around various inboxes next week?

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That was Get Wit Quick No. 243, the only Leap Year edition of this newsletter and thus a true rarity. The best businesses to be in are those in which mistakes make the product more valuable, like an upside-down postage stamp. The select typos in my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting have yet to earn out. Of my 2,600 readers, approximately 10 tap the ❤️ below on each issue, putting you in the top 0.3% of an already elite group.