The Wit's Guide to Sleep
Or, the moronic fraternity
Like rust, wit never sleeps. If your cranium is overflowing with zingers, you can’t squeeze in any shuteye. And so most of the Great Wits were insomniacs.
They come in different flavors: The ones who dearly miss sleep and the ones who have grown to despise it, like Wile E. Coyote hates the Roadrunner. Taunted by the Zs they can never quite catch, they take revenge through wit. (Not that sleep cares.)
“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov was perhaps slumber’s most articulate foe, and he admitted up front it was because he wasn’t very good at it.
“All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper,” he wrote in Speak, Memory. “No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.”
Most amusing is how the bleary-eyed go after the intelligence of the well-rested, equating all snoozers to losers. Nabokov sneers at train passengers who “lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring.”
“Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.”
— J.B. Priestley
Are those silly-armed cow-people who adore sleep lazy? The essay Why I Love Sleep is by Fran Lebowitz, a writer who has spent most of her career not writing. “I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use,” she writes. “Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness of being awake.”
Lebowitz isn’t lazy though; she’s just a professional talker who uses the fact she was once a writer as fodder. And while she doesn’t mention insomnia in that early essay, she’s since said she no longer sleeps.
“Sleep is death without the responsibility.”
— Fran Lebowitz
And then there’s The Big Sleep, something you end up thinking about quite a bit when you can’t get the little sleep. That’s what Larkin’s on about in Aubade (and loyal readers take a shot of espresso every time I mention that poem).
Emil Cioran, the hilariously bleak French philosopher of nihilism, wrote about his insomnia in books such as On The Heights of Despair and The Trouble with Being Born. “Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute,” Cioran writes. “And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.”
The Partially Examined Life has a nice distillation of his work that suggests there is no mind-body divide; it’s only when the philosopher takes up vigorous bicycling that he finds a modicum of peace.
“What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper?”
— Emil Cioran
The ultimate sleepless wit was Dorothy Parker, as evidenced by her 1936 New Yorker story The Little Hours. Her narrator can’t rest precisely because she’s tortured by great quips. “La Rochefoucauld this and La Rochefoucauld that,” she thinks. “Yes, well, let me tell you that if nobody have ever learned to quote, very few people would be in love with La Rochefoucauld.”
“Early to bed and early to rise is a bad rule for anyone who wishes to become acquainted with our most prominent and influential people.”
— George Ade
Counting sheep doesn’t work for Parker, and neither does counting bills. Her penultimate strategy is to “repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.” It doesn’t work, which explains why you’re still reading this sentence.
Finally, she makes the decision that explains how sleeplessness breeds wit just as wit breeds sleeplessness: “There’ll be no more of this nonsense; I’m going to turn on the light and read my head off.”
“The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.”
— Wilson Mizner
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“Writing to you is like corresponding with an aching void.”
— Groucho Marx
Yawn and the world yawns with you; laugh maniacally and the world thinks you’re crazy. But who cares what the world thinks? I do, and every week I ask the premium select VIP members of the world who subscribe to this newsletter to choose the next adventure. What’ll it be next time? If none of the choices below appeal, do drop your write-in candidate in the comments.
Speaking of…
Things that put you to sleep
La Rochefoucauld this and La Rochefoucauld that
The 175th issue of Get Wit Quick was written in the wee small hours because, as Parker correctly notes, good lines keep you up. She also blamed early bedtimes, saying “Early to bed, and you’ll wish you were dead. Bed before eleven, nuts before seven.” Though maybe it’s good to be nuts before the day starts, just so you get it over with. This newsletter grew out of my 2014 book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, which will either put you to sleep or keep you up. Tap the ❤️ to turn out the lights.
Cioran seems like he’s be a joy to be stood next to a house party. Laugh a minute.