The Wit’s Guide to Razzle Dazzle

Or, truth on a bender

Was Arthur Lismer high on oil paint fumes when he painted the SS Olympic in Halifax harbour? No! That’s the ol’ razzle dazzle!

When you give ’em the old razzle dazzle, why do they take it? When, as Billy Flynn sings in Chicago, you give ’em an act with lots of flash in it, he guarantees that the reaction will be passionate. Shouldn’t they know better? “Throw ’em a fake and a finagle,” go the lyrics by Kander and Ebb. “They’ll never know you’re just a bagel.” Maybe they like bagels?

“When you have nothing to say, sing it.”
— David Ogilvy

Or to increase the metaphorical protein: If you get the sizzle without the steak, you’ve clearly been scammed and should file a complaint. But if you get the steak without the sizzle, what are you really missing? The razzle dazzle, that’s what. You need that razzle dazzle.

“Baloney is the unvarnished lie laid on so thick you hate it. Blarney is flattery laid on so thin you love it.”
— Fulton Sheen

To really understand the razzle dazzle, we need to drag it into the workshop and break it down into its component parts. A note here: Whenever you’re about to take something apart, snap a few pictures of it so you can put it back together. Otherwise you’ve got a razzle, a dazzle, a whole bunch of Robertson head screws, and very little showmanship to show for it.

“Dirt glitters when the sun happens to shine.”
— Goethe

First, the razzle. To be on the razzle, in British slang, is to be on a spree, having a good time, carousing and merrymaking, likely under the influence. There’s a Tom Stoppard play I’d never heard of till this week called On The Razzle, wherein two Austrian shopboys escape their small-town boss for a wild time in Vienna.

“Desires stir in my breast like crates on a badly loaded barrow,” Weinberl laments to Christopher, and the only solution is a razzle.

“If only I could look back on a day when I was fancy free, a real razzle of a day packed with adventure and high jinks, a day to remember … but I have nothing to remember,” Weinberl laments. “I’ve got to acquire a past before it’s too late!”

“Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.”
— E.M. Forster

Then, the dazzle. You want to amaze (good) or bewilder (bad) the audience. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind.” You can’t just turn the floodlights on someone who’s just woken up! Instead, the poet explains, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

“All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.”
— Nicolas Chamfort

In the First World War, ships were painted with so-called razzle dazzle camouflage patterns to make them harder to hit. The result made them look less deadly and more like floating undergraduate art projects. The story goes that when Pablo Picasso saw a cannon painted this way on the streets of Paris, he assumed the military men were just copying the Cubists.

“Dare to dazzle anew, rising repeatedly like the sun, shining in different fields, so that your absence in one area awakens desire and your novel appearance in another, applause.”
— Baltasar Gracián

The razzle dazzle, then, is a carousing version of the truth, one we can’t help but follow. Don’t we live in a time of too much showmanship, where it’s all style and no substance? Sure. But it’s dangerous to assume the opposite, to assume people will one day tire of Doritos and start eating boiled lentils. Whether you’re selling goods or bads, the razzle dazzle is always required.

“Too much truth
Is uncouth.”
— Franklin P. Adams

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“It is almost always worthwhile to be cheated; people’s little frauds have an interest which more than repays what they cost us.”
— Logan Pearsall Smith

Six years ago this week, The New York Times tweeted that: “Many Canadians are giddy at the prospect that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would be moving to Canada, injecting some razzle dazzle to the sprawling, bone-chillingly cold country.” Somehow, we muddled through without Markle’s sparkle. And for next week?

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The even older Razzle Dazzle

The above reptile is of course Howard The Turtle, a puppet who appeared on the 1961-66 CBC television show Razzle Dazzle and a fact I learned from Ed Conroy’s Retrontario newsletter. At the end of each episode, fans used their Decoder Wheel to read a secret message displayed on the screen. Should I adopt a similar perk for Get Wit Quick subscribers? Or something else? Please take 45 seconds to tell me in the The 0th Annual Two-Minute Get Wit Quick Reader Survey!

Get Wit Quick No. 352 was a bit higgledy-piggledy and occasionally helter skelter but never hoity-toity, at least not on purpose. I’m thinking of painting my car razzle dazzle to avoid speed traps. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. As Billy Flynn might sing, if I wrap my smarts in a bow, they’ll surely tap the ❤️ below.