The Wit’s Guide To Skeletons

Or, the gift you’ve wrapped

Oct 31, 2024

Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle, or Skeleton’s Music Unappreciated By Reductive Artist, Arnold Böcklin, 1872.

Witches, werewolves, vampires, Wednesday Addams, Beetlejuice, Raygun: All these costume ideas pale in comparison to the skeleton. It’s the only disguise you can put on that approximates taking everything off. And though it’s tempting to cut out the middleman, on a cost-adjusted basis and even if all the houses on your block give out king-size candy bars, it’s not worth it.

“I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.”
— Mary Roach

Who had the first skeleton in their closet? According to my Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, there was once a (suspiciously poorly documented) global search for a person “without a single care or trouble.” A lady was found who satisfied every question the searchers asked, except when they found out she kept the skeleton of her husband’s rival in a closet and was forced to kiss it every night. Or maybe she made her husband gaze upon it each day. Or maybe the closeted husband kissed the skeleton? At any rate, this highly dubious story is maybe where the expression comes from?

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
— George Bernard Shaw

A better, or at least better sourced, origin story dates back to The Murder Act of 1752, by which the British Parliament allowed the corpses of executed murderers to be claimed by the Company of Surgeons for study. A tidy solution to two problems, except the murder conviction rate couldn’t keep pace with the advance of medical education. By the early 19th century, a thriving homicide trade sprung up to provide fresh bodies for the knowledge-thirsty medical community, thus filling their cupboards with skeletons. This ratio of lives lost for future lives hypothetically saved wasn’t great press for healthcare professionals, hence The Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed doctors to claim unwanted bodies 48 hours after death or, given standards of the time, very deep sleep. By the 1850s, William Thackeray and others were using the closet expression, and the rest is history we’d clearly all rather forget.

“There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless.”
— John Barrymore

Most doctors today agree that if you can see your own skeleton, it’s not good. This is why, despite their supreme utility, skeletons are spooky. G.K. Chesterton, a definitively unskeletal figure, called it “a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure.” The natural explanation is that we’re afraid of death, often personified as a skeleton carrying a farming implement, but G.K.C. argues it’s not that but rather “the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque.” Which brings us back to the old mind-body question: Do you have a skeleton, or are you a skeleton? The answer:

“You’re a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?”
— Rat Sandwich

The modern master of skeleton jokes is

Roblin Meeks

, a writer and academic known on Twitter and now BlueSky as @dorsalstream. He generally frames the frames of our bodies as our mischievous pets, which may be the best way to think about them. His bone-cold classics:

Your skeleton is just a gift that time slowly unwraps.
I like going to the cemetery early in the morning because, if you’re calm and patient, the skeletons will approach and even eat right out of your hand.
Whenever I start to feel lonely, I just remind myself that my skeleton is in there like a forever friend, going where I go, doing what I do, loving who I love.
I’m not gaining weight; I’m upgrading my skeleton to business class.
Scientists don’t want you to know that you can pass notes to your skeleton by writing apothegms on bits of cheese right before you swallow them.

And do think about them, not just today but every day! Just don’t expect your ungrateful skeleton to ever return the favour.

“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
— Virginia Woolf

Riposte Cards are commissioned each month using the monies provided by my lovely paid subscribers, and in the 20 that have thus far been printed, there are skeletons! I’ll mail them to you if you upgrade your subscription today:

Oh, also! All my paid subscribers get this handy wallet card to help them master all situations:

Let’s not think about it! But if you must…

My weekly News Quiz in the Toronto Star is, sadly, about The News. Last week, some very close contests. Sigh.

We don’t need no stinking sequiturs!

From loyal reader Blake Markle:
Gen Z shops at Say Less Shoe Source.

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“The sound of a harpsichord – two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.”
— Sir Thomas Beecham

So by this time next week, we’ll all be more stressed or less stressed or possibly the same amount of stressed. Which is a good time to remember that “stressed” spelled backwards is “comprehensive electoral reform.”

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That was issue No. 278 of Get Wit Quick, the perfect consolation prize for anyone who wasn’t able to buy a 12-foot Skelly lawn ornament from Home Depot. I read all the origin stories of this giant skeleton so you wouldn’t have to, and I learned that people like big things and memes. Maybe I’ll ask my publishers to reissue a 12-foot tall edition of Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting? Reach through the digital rib cage to tap the ❤️ below.