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WORK TITLE: Elements of Taste
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://benjaminerrett.com/
CITY: Toronto
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/228906/benjamin-errett
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2015011321
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Errett, Benjamin, 1978-
Located: Toronto (Ont.)
Birth date: 1978
Profession or occupation:
Authors Newspaper editors Journalists
Found in: Errett, Benjamin. Elements of wit, 2014: title page
(Benjamin Errett) back cover (Benjamin Errett is the
managing editor for features at the National Post, a
Canadian national newspaper. He lives in Toronto.)
LAC, January 26, 2015: heading (Errett, Benjamin, 1978-)
OCLC, January 26, 2015: (usage: Errett, Benjamin, Errett,
Benjamin, 1978-)
Author's page at LinkedIn, January 26, 2015: (Benjamin
Errett, current position, Director of Strategy at
National Post. Previous position, Managing Editor,
Features at National Post. Author of Elements of wit and
Jew and improved.)
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PERSONAL
Born 1978.
ADDRESS
CAREER
National Post, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, managing editor of features, currently director of strategy.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
National Post editor and director of strategy Benjamin Errett is the author of Jew and Improved: How Choosing to Be Chosen Made Me a Better Man, Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting, and Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why. In Elements of Wit, the author “defines wit as `spontaneous creativity,'” said Rebekah Kati, writing in Library Journal, “and dissects the notion by describing the conditions needed for it to occur.” “What makes us happy,” Errett told Weekend Edition Sunday‘s interviewer Ari Shapiro, “to be in social situations. So if you are perennially worried that you’re not going to have something to say at a dinner party or in an elevator or at a family reunion, you’re really depriving yourself of one of the main joys in life.” Wit, Errett points out, is situational—an apt response to a situation, usually with an element of humor. “Twain and Churchill are among the many historical figures that Mr. Errett presents as models of wit,” stated Dave Shiflett in the Wall Street Journal, “along with Groucho Marx, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Levant, who said of a politician that `he’ll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it’ and of a banker: `He’s a self-made man. Who else would help?’ Yet Mr. Errett does not confine himself to the past. Rapper Jay-Z, he says, is a world-class witty improviser, while the late Christopher Hitchens shared Wilde’s talent for conversation that was often wittier than his writing.” “It’s not enough that Winston Churchill saved Western civilization,” stated Errett in the Huffington Post; “he also delivered countless brilliant ripostes that were handed down through the ages. While he clearly had the mind to issue impromptu wisecracks, that same mind was certainly always saving the best lines it came across for later deployment.”
In Elements of Taste, Errett uses the sense of taste as a metaphor for understanding popularity in culture. He “combines the terminology of tastes detectable by the human tongue–sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami–with a social-psychology framework,” explained a Publishers Weekly reviewer. “Just as you have those fundamental flavours in food to help you curate what you’re eating, you can do the same thing for what you’re consuming culturally. I did all sorts of research for the book and found you can divide cultural genres fairly cleanly into five categories that roughly correspond with sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami,” Errett explained to Megan Ogilvie in the Toronto Star. “Good taste or bad taste doesn’t make sense anymore. Those were the rules that made sense when there was one cultural arbiter of taste, when everyone was reading Life magazine in the 1950s and it told you what was good or bad.” “Through a series of case studies and abridged riffs on various pop cultural preoccupations, from Coldplay through to True Detective and `futurist cooking,'” wrote John Semley in the Toronto Globe and Mail, “Errett proposes that all cultural objects are constituted by the metaphorical interplay of these five basic flavours. So, for example, the wildly popular Marvel Cinematic Universe is wildly popular because of its ‘sweet-sour combo’ of ‘thrills without danger, just enough excitement to raise your heart rate but not enough to worry you.’ Errett does a fine job justifying his extended analogy, however arbitrary it may seem.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), November 3, 2017, John Semley, review of Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why.
Library Journal, September 15, 2014, Rebekah Kati, review of Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting, p. 86.
Publishers Weekly, June 19, 2017, review of Elements of Taste, p. 100.
Star (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), October 20, 2017, Megan Ogilvie, “Want to Know Why You Love True Crime or Unicorn Frappuccinos? This Author Can Explain.”
Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2014, Dave Shiflett, review of Elements of Wit.
ONLINE
HarperCollins Website, http://www.harpercollins.ca/ (April 11, 2018), author profile.
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (October 8, 2014), Benjamin Errett, “How to Be Effortlessly Witty in 4 Effortful Steps.”
Penguin Random House Website, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/ (April 11, 2018), author profile.
Rights Factory, http://therightsfactory.com/ (April 11, 2018), author profile.
Weekend Edition Sunday, http://www.npr.org/ (October 12, 2014), Ari Shapiro, “Book Offers a Get-Wit-Quick Workout.”
Benjamin Errett spent a decade editing the arts pages of the National Post. Once they were finally edited, he wrote this book. Recommended pairings include his previous book (Elements of Wit) and a dry white wine. Maybe a Sémillon? He dips his fries in mayonnaise and lives in Toronto.
Benjamin Errett
Who is Benjamin Errett and what gives him the unmitigated audacity to tell me of all people how to be interesting?! Great question! Sure, I’m a super interesting guy, but Elements of Wit isn’t about that. It’s my stab at a unified theory of what makes good things good. What was it that makes the plays of Tom Stoppard, the comedy of Louis CK, the poetry of Patricia Lockwood, the music of Kanye West, the essays of Christopher Hitchens and the best of Twitter so addictive? I’m pretty sure it’s WIT — which I define as spontaneous creativity — and I’m also pretty sure we can all learn something from the lives of the Great Wits.
Benjamin is represented by: Sam Hiyate
Biography
Benjamin Errett studied biology at McGill University and was just about to head off to medical school when he realized what he really wanted to do was write terrifically punny headlines about popular culture. At 22, he was hired as an editor at the National Post with next to no experience. Now 30, Benjamin is a managing editor at the paper.
Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why
Publishers Weekly. 264.25 (June 19, 2017): p100.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why
Benjamin Errett. TarcherPerigee, $16 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-399-18344-7
This witty, fast-paced survey from National Post features editor Errett (Elements of Wit) combines the terminology of tastes detectable by the human tongue--sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami--with a social-psychology framework to explain entertainment preferences. The sitcom Friends, for example, is classified as "sweet," whereas Kanye West is "bitter." Then there are the rare cultural phenomena that hit all categories on the taste spectrum--Errett terms them "cultural ketchup"--such as Star Wars. Marvel superhero films and Katy Perry are explored for the secret to their popularity (Errett claims that the secret of the latter's popularity is "sexuality just wholesome enough to be sold at Walmart"), but it is Errett's dissection of cultural oddities such as cozy mystery novels about cold-blooded murder or "futurist cooking" that are truly fascinating. Fans of obscure delights will enjoy the book's discussion of a Canadian slush-drink manufacturer (with flavor names such as "Crushed Smurf' and "Wild Tar") and of "slow" Norwegian television programming featuring, for example, " 134 hours of a cruise ship sailing along the coastline." The book also contains plenty of interesting trivia, with blurbs on the history of punk rock, "supertasters," and the discovery of umami. Ideally, understanding the elements of taste will help readers better understand what appeals to them and thus decide what to pursue next. The droll sketches peppered throughout and Errett's amusing commentary ensure a read as fun as it is informative. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why." Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 100. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643900/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=16cbf07c. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496643900
Errett, Benjamin. Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting
Rebekah Kati
Library Journal. 139.15 (Sept. 15, 2014): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Errett, Benjamin. Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting. Perigee. Oct. 2014. 256p. index. ISBN 9780399169106. pap. $16; ebk. ISBN 9780698153868. COMM
Errett (managing editor, National Post, Canada) defines wit as "spontaneous creativity" and dissects the notion by describing the conditions needed for it to occur, the purpose of using it, and the occasions in which one might need to be witty. Owing to the spontaneous nature of quips, the author does not include a foolproof how-to guide for becoming a "Great Wit" but discusses the idea within the concept of 12 elements, including guidelines and perspective into the inner workings of humor. Each element is explored in turn, using insights from psychology, history, and even examples of witty people such as Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Louis C.K., and Jay-Z. Additionally, the concluding chapter provides a set of principles for applying wit in social situations, such as at work, office parties, or even funerals. The resulting analysis is an incisive and often hilarious look at the process behind the most memorable and effortless one-liners. VERDICT Recommended for anyone who desires to learn how to be witty as well as those who wish to learn more about the theory behind humor.--Rebekah Kati, Duke Univ. Pr., Durham, NC
Kati, Rebekah
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kati, Rebekah. "Errett, Benjamin. Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2014, p. 86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A382279296/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e7362df9. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A382279296
Book Offers A Get-Wit-Quick Workout
Weekend Edition Sunday. 2014.
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SHAPIRO: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Ari Shapiro. What do Jay-Z, Oscar Wilde and Cary Grant have in common? According to the author Benjamin Errett, they all possessed extraordinary wit. His new book asks how they got that way.
ERRETT: Can you try to be a wit? The answer is a definite yes. Will your efforts come to anything? The answer is decidedly less certain. The inverse law of repartee has it that the hard-earned individual attempts to be funny in social situations, the stronger stink of flop-sweat that wafts off that poor soul. Effort and effervescence simply can't share the same room. It takes hard work to get those bubbles in the champagne, but you don't want to think about that when you're popping a bottle.
SHAPIRO: Benjamin Errett's book is called "Elements Of Wit: Mastering The Art Of Being Interesting." He says it's not as effortless as it looks. Wit takes work.
ERRETT: It's a muscle. If you don't use it, it'll go slack. But if you are in the wit-equivalent of a gym every day, you're going to get better.
SHAPIRO: What is the wit-equivalent of a gym?
ERRETT: Well, I think it starts with my book.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
ERRETT: My book is like the six-minute abs of which. But all of these sort of people that I've referenced and the things that they've written and performed in and created, these are sort of the exercise machines, to strain this metaphor. How, I got to this book in the first place was basically thinking, what is it that makes all the stuff that I love good? What makes good stuff good?
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
ERRETT: You know, like the essays of Christopher Hitchens or the poems of Patricia Lockwood or the music of Kanye West, the persona of Fran Lebowitz, all of these things that I just find fascinating. They're not funny. You can't say that, you know, Hitchens was funny, but he was definitely witty.
SHAPIRO: Well, this may sound like an obvious question, but why should people aspire to be witty? What good does it do?
ERRETT: Well, I think, you know, humans are social animals, and that is what makes us happy, to be in social situations. So if you are perennially worried that you're not going to have something to say at a dinner party or in an elevator or at a family reunion, you're really depriving yourself of one of the main joys in life. I mean, when you're sort of able to go into those situations with a little bit more comfort, a little bit more ease and awareness that you are well-equipped to deal with whatever happens to be thrown at you, then it's just a more rewarding way to live.
SHAPIRO: One of the quintessential wits who you write about in this book is Oscar Wilde, and many people, I think, would assume that his wittiest lines came trippingly off the tongue. You write that, in fact, that's not the case.
ERRETT: He's an interesting case because a lot of what he's done was lifted and borrowed and recycled. You can even see in some of his most famous works, there are lines that reappear. So he was always honing and fine-tuning everything that he was doing. And one of the interesting things about him that I really find admirable is that he had this persona in sort of salon society in Victorian London as this guy who was a great talker, but what has he ever done? And he was sort of known in society - he was sort of a Kardashian of his time. But he went on to do works of great substance and lasting value.
SHAPIRO: I wonder whether the story of Oscar Wilde suggests that in order to be profoundly witty, you also in some way have to be profoundly unhappy or damaged in some way.
ERRETT: That's interesting 'cause that comes back to the idea of wit as being a facet of creativity and the sort of eternal stereotype of the creative as a miserable person.
SHAPIRO: Or wit as a defense mechanism.
ERRETT: That's true, exactly. And, you know, I looked at it as basically being two sides of a coin. You could have snide wit, cruel wit or you could have - and I've chosen to put the emphasis on - the compassionate side of the coin, the idea that wit can make you resilient and bounce back. And one of my favorite examples of that is Nora Ephron who, of course, was a journalist in the tough, very male newspaper days of the '60s and '70s, came up in that world. She had her famous divorce that led to the book and then the movie "Heartburn." And I really liked that as an example of someone sort of taking the lemons that life gave her and - however you want to twist that metaphor, either making limoncello or throwing them back or using them to garnish a martini - but just using what she got and using her quick-wittedness to prosper from it.
SHAPIRO: In this book, you don't write about yourself. But I was curious, what inspired you as an author to write a book about wit? Was it a sense that you wanted to impart your wisdom to others, or was it a sense that you were looking in on this club that you weren't a part of and wanted to learn how to be part of it?
ERRETT: Yeah, I came into this with next to no wisdom, so I won't...
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) Were you good at a dinner party before you wrote this book?
ERRETT: I'm much better at it now. Let me put it that way. The reason I wrote the book was there was all of these people I find so amazing, these people who just seem to have a mastery over life. And what I came down to was wit. It is they have a certain spontaneous creativity, an ability to be funny when called for, but to be trenchant when necessary. And from that, I would think I was able to provide a book that would help people just sort of seeing the man behind the curtain and knowing that there is a man behind the curtain, knowing there is a lot of hard work in these personas that seem so effortless.
SHAPIRO: Benjamin Errett is the author of "Elements Of Wit: Mastering The Art Of Being Interesting." Thanks for joining us.
ERRETT: Thank you.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Book Offers A Get-Wit-Quick Workout." Weekend Edition Sunday, 12 Oct. 2014. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A385968352/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4c686e4e. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A385968352
Review: Benjamin Errett’s Elements of Taste is refreshingly prescriptive
Open this photo in gallery:
JOHN SEMLEY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published November 3, 2017
Updated November 3, 2017
Title
Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why
Author
Benjamin Errett
Genre
Non-fiction
Publisher
TarcherPerigee
Pages
227
Price
$22
Early in his new book about taste, Benjamin Errett signals his own. "Everyone knows there are two definitions of 'taste,' " he writes. "What the book presupposes is, maybe there aren't."
He's paraphrasing Eli Cash, Owen Wilson's character in Wes Anderson's 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums. A drugged-up, hyperpretentious writer of historical fiction, Cash describes his novel Old Custer with the following, tantalizing pitch: "Everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is … maybe he didn't."
As a reference, it's pretty much perfect: sly, unsourced, just-obscure-enough. It hangs out there like an open palm of a secret handshake, extended to anyone who is equipped to grab it. Those savvy enough to catch a reference to a middlebrow ensemble comedy are expected to be won over to Errett's side. "This guy likes what I like," an imagined reader may think. And in discussing matters of taste – and in criticism more generally – a sense of friendly affinity goes a long way.
Late in his book, Errett writes about recommendation algorithms and how "before you crack open the recommended book, you should trust the recommender." Elements of Taste, the author's follow-up, of sorts, to his Elements of Wit, his 2014 guide to "being interesting," established that trust early on.
If the Tenenbaums reference soars over anyone's head, it's really not a big deal. Because, more than being a joke or a vacuous nod to a piece of pop culture, the line constitutes the actual thesis of Elements of Taste, a book that thinks through taste (that is, cultural discernment; the process by which we determine and display the stuff we like) using taste (that is, the perception of flavour on the tongue) as a structuring metaphor. It may seem more than a little hokey. But the thing is: it works. More or less.
To develop his thesis, and create his "Grand Unified Theory of Taste," Errett maps the five basic tastes found on the tongue (which are sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami) onto a structure for entertainment preferences established in a 2011 academic paper (which are communal, dark, thrilling, aesthetic and cerebral). Through a series of case studies and abridged riffs on various pop cultural preoccupations, from Coldplay through to True Detective and "futurist cooking," Errett proposes that all cultural objects are constituted by the metaphorical interplay of these five basic flavours. So, for example, the wildly popular Marvel Cinematic Universe is wildly popular because of its "sweet-sour combo" of "thrills without danger, just enough excitement to raise your heart rate but not enough to worry you."
Errett does a fine job justifying his extended analogy, however arbitrary it may seem (indeed, as he notes, even the taste centres found on our tongues are not some "Newtonian law handed down by evolution" but rather "a basic consensus"). Where Elements of Taste distinguishes itself from other contemporary tomes about taste is in its refreshing prescriptiveness.
Errett serves up "tasting menus" for readers, creating a harmony between those five central cultural flavours. "Have the sour thrills of pop-punk lost their edge?" he asks his reader. "Perhaps some bitterly atonal experimental music will reawaken your taste buds." Here, Elements of Taste becomes a model for a handmade, bespoke recommendation algorithm. It's enough to justify Errett's book. But the compulsion to dissect matters of taste at all still feels a bit odd.
Readings books about taste or the pseudo-science of cultural popularity, I am often reminded (and here I'll reveal my own pop cultural affinities) of that scene in The Simpsons in which a massive restaurant chain attempts to distill the ingredients of the "Flaming Moe," a trendy alcoholic beverage that's seemingly impossible to faithfully replicate. After sending the cocktail through some cockamamie machine, its components are printed out on a sheet of dot matrix paper. "The secret ingredient," says the nasally researcher-in-charge, "is: Love?!"
In studies of taste and discernment, whether rigorously academic (as in Pierre Bourdieu) or more informal (as in Errett), the secret ingredient is always love. Or something like it, anyway. There's always some irreducible remainder, some je ne sais quoi that justifies why we like what we like, beyond the algorithms and formulas and ad hoc schemata of judgment. In his bestselling Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, Derek Thompson works through all manner of lively case studies for why things click in a given cultural milieu, only to arrive at the slightly annoying conclusion that hits are accelerated by a smattering of "magic sprinkle dust" (this is made extra-annoying because Thompson is abusing the much more common phrase "magic pixie dust").
Likewise, in Elements of Taste, Errett uses umami, that savoury taste that awakens the back of the tongue when you eat shiitake mushrooms or dry-aged beef, as "the indescribable taste … that we clearly crave but can't quite identify." Beyond the fact that actual, on-the-tongue umami is fairly easy to identify (especially if you know what you're looking, or tasting, for) such deferrals to an indescribable remainder always feel unsatisfactory. If the deconstruction of taste always leaves some dangling leftover, and if that leftover is itself the very essence of our taste formation, then the whole endeavour feels rather pointless.
And so, we're left with another structuring remainder: a nagging contradiction in the whole enterprise of analyzing taste. The proliferation of books on taste and popularity suggest the benefit of developing an exhaustive, exacting understand of why we like what we like. They presuppose that there are good reasons for labouring over motivations for our private, personal preferences. Then again, you know, maybe there aren't.
Book Review: ‘The Elements of Wit’ by Benjamin Errett
Oscar Levant said of a banker: ‘He’s a self-made man. Who else would help?’
Book Review: ‘The Elements of Wit’ by Benjamin Errett
Getty Images
By Dave Shiflett
Oct. 3, 2014 5:13 p.m. ET
1 COMMENTS
Those who have come to the harsh if not unreasonable conclusion that they are dreadful bores may take heart that theirs is not a terminal condition. “Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting” promises to teach the wit-deprived hordes how to become modern-day Oscar Wildes and Dorothy Parkers.
Some may suggest that only the desperately dull could believe that they will master the art of being interesting by reading a slender volume like “Elements of Wit” and that its author, Benjamin Errett, has clearly mastered the art of chutzpah. But Mr. Errett, an editor at Canada’s National Post, has written an entertaining book that, at worse, will inspire his customers to read as widely as possible and, with the help of a few martinis, crack a little wiser than before.
Mr. Errett begins by defining wit as an act of “spontaneous creativity” that combines “disparate ideas to create delight.” This quality stands in contrast to simply being “humorous,” which is often nothing more, he notes, than regurgitating stale jokes or spewing sarcasm and glibness.
The Elements of Wit
By Benjamin Errett
Perigee, 232 pages, $16
Timing really is everything, Mr. Errett stresses. “Unlike humor, wit is a speed game.” Lesson No. 1 is that you can’t combine “disparate ideas” on an empty noggin, so would-be wits must spend time stocking their mental file cabinets with material that can be retrieved at clutch moments. Lady Astor once told Winston Churchill that if she were married to him, she would poison his coffee. “If I were married to you,” he responded, “I’d drink it.” Mr. Errett notes that Churchill was “using a line that dates back to a joke column in the Chicago Tribune.” Sir Winston had grasped the essential truth that quoting without attribution can make one seem all the cleverer.
Churchill embodies several other elements of wit identified by Mr. Errett, including charm, confidence and “flow,” the last of which he likens to the improvisational fluency of jazz musicians. Churchill also understood the value of “refreshment” in unleashing and enhancing wit, an element that Mr. Errett praises, though in quantities that would not upset the Surgeon General. The “maximally witty state is induced by the first or second drink,” he writes, a motion seconded by Mark Twain: “I find that about two glasses of champagne are an admirable stimulant to the tongue,” though “wine is a clog to the pen.”
Twain and Churchill are among the many historical figures that Mr. Errett presents as models of wit, along with Groucho Marx, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Levant, who said of a politician that “he’ll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it” and of a banker: “He’s a self-made man. Who else would help?”
Yet Mr. Errett does not confine himself to the past. Rapper Jay-Z, he says, is a world-class witty improviser, while the late Christopher Hitchens shared Wilde’s talent for conversation that was often wittier than his writing. Mr. Errett also gives nods to Louis C.K., Tina Fey, Nora Ephron and the columnist Gail Collins, whom he hails as the wittiest writer on the New York Times op-ed page. Perhaps praising someone for being funnier than Paul Krugman is a joke in itself.
Mr. Errett even finds witty greatness on Twitter, quoting a 2010 tweet named by the actor Stephen Fry as the “most beautiful tweet ever tweeted”: “I believe we can build a better world! Of course it will take a lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.” Older readers may feel that a gag that bad would have gotten you the hook in the Catskills, where, to some patrons at least, a lame joke was no laughing matter.
Readers of a pedantic nature will note that many of the figures whom Mr. Errett hails as wits are not exactly practicing the “spontaneous creativity” that is one of wit’s core attributes. Writers have lots of time to polish their lines. The wit of the sit-com characters on “Seinfeld”—hailed by Mr. Errett—is about as spur-of-the-moment as a lunar-landing mission. On Mr. Errett’s behalf, it should be recognized that, while brevity is the soul of wit (he dedicates a chapter to it), a book devoted only to witty conversationalists would have been thinner than George Costanza’s hairline.
Beyond his desire to make people “interesting,” Mr. Errett is on something of a holy mission: championing a softer, gentler wit. He notes that Groucho Marx thought Oscar Levant had “a brittle hardness and rudeness that just irritates me” and in the same spirit puts down snark as “speedy meanness.” The wit he wants “makes the world ever so slightly better.” He finds kindred spirits in Robert Benchley, Ogden Nash and Rebecca Northan, whose “Blind Date” stage show includes a spontaneous segment designed to make audience members “look good.”
While admiring Mr. Errett’s positive vibe, some readers may hold to the belief that wit of a darker nature best brightens the day. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens was more than a bit over the top titling his book on Mother Teresa “The Missionary Position,” but who among us could help but crack a smile at John Lennon’s quip that Ringo Starr not only wasn’t the best drummer in the world but wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles? A sharp tongue bites like a smiling serpent—as Lady Astor and other deserving parties have discovered to their eternal dismay and wit’s eternal glory.
—Mr. Shiflett’s original music and writing is posted at www.daveshiflett.com.
THE BLOG 10/08/2014 09:14 am ET Updated Dec 08, 2014
How To Be Effortlessly Witty In 4 Effortful Steps
By Benjamin Errett
Wit is to life what salt is to food: The spice that makes it not only tolerable but delicious. You can buy salt in a box at the corner store, but where do you find wit? It’s in just about every work of art that’s worth your time: the plays of Tom Stoppard, the poems of Patricia Lockwood, the songs of Jay-Z, the persona of Fran Lebowitz and the essays of Christopher Hitchens, for starters.
But what is wit, exactly? An ineffable quality, perhaps, one that’s easy to spot but impossible to define? Nah. In my very effable new book Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting, I define it quite simply as Spontaneous Creativity. Wit is the phrase you turn on the fly, the ready reference that’s ever so slightly askew and the point that wins the game. And to find out more about what wit is, I take a close look at who wit is and was. Here are a few of the Great Wits paired with insights on what made their zingers zing.
Steal Like A Great British Prime Minister
It’s not enough that Winston Churchill saved Western civilization; he also delivered countless brilliant ripostes that were handed down through the ages. While he clearly had the mind to issue impromptu wisecracks, that same mind was certainly always saving the best lines it came across for later deployment. When he was called out for being drunk and responded that he’d be sober in the morning while his accuser would still be ugly, he was borrowing a line from a W.C. Fields movie that had been in joke columns for decades prior.
But the right person used the right line at the right time, and that’s what we remember.
Start Carrying a Notebook — and Then Stop
As a young man, Shawn Carter was always carrying a spiral-bound notebook, writing down rhymes whenever they popped into his head. He’d bust them out in rap battles on the streets of Brooklyn, honing the persona later known as Jay Z. Eventually, he didn’t need the notebook; he could rely on what he calls his inner rainman to spit the verses as required. As legendary producer Rick Rubin exclaims in the documentary ‘Fade To Black’: “The way he writes, I’ve never seen anything like it. Because he doesn’t write it down.”
Do Something Original With Life’s Lemons
It’s not easy. But Nora Ephron’s entire career was a testimonial to the restorative power of deep wit. She was taught by her writing parents that everything was copy, and she used that ethos to build a brilliant career in the man’s world of New York newspapering. When she caught her husband cheating on her and used the divorce to write the bestselling-book-turned-hit-movie Heartburn — “Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from,” as she later summarized it — it became eternally clear that said copy (which was everything) came from her typewriter.
When in doubt, prebreak a prefix.
Hey, remember the ineffable/effable line from way back at the beginning of this article? That was solid, no? It’s a classic bit of grammatical wit used best by P.G. Wodehouse in the following sentence from The Code of the Woosters in 1938: “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
Is it a shortcut? Sure. Will it always work? No. Is it useful next time you need to dismantle an inept or uncouth character? Indubitably!
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9 Quick Reads
Benjamin Errett
Author, ‘Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting’
Want to know why you love true crime or unicorn Frappuccinos? This author can explain
Benjamin Errett’s new book, Elements of Taste, describes how cultural tastes map on to culinary tastes — and how you can seek out new cultural experiences that hit the notes you prefer.
By Megan OgilvieHealth Reporter
Fri., Oct. 20, 2017
From super hero blockbusters to the Margaret Atwood revival, true-crime podcasts to unicorn Frappuccinos, plus every Despacito moment, sneaker trend and Taylor Swift spat in between: It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the incessant cycles of popular culture.
You can ignore the noise and listen to your favourite songs on repeat. You can voraciously devour all that is new, catching the moments but never appreciating the details.
Or you can read Benjamin Errett’s new book, Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why.
The Toronto-based writer, who spent more than a decade as the arts editor at the National Post, hopes his book will help people more easily digest the 24-7 barrage of pop culture.
Rather than pose as a tastemaker — he never tells you what you should like — Errett, 39, aims to help readers uncover the whys of their own cultural preferences. Once we understand our love of ’90s sitcoms, for example, then we can seek out other, as yet unknown, favourite things that hit the same cultural notes.
Errett spoke to the Star about how cultural tastes map on to culinary tastes and how using that theory can expand your cultural palate.
For many of us, our tastes are just our tastes. We like what we like because we like it. I will always choose ketchup chips, never sour cream and onion. Why is it important to understand our preferences?
I feel the same way. There are things I absolutely love without ever thinking about them. But the only way to find out what else you are going to love is to figure out why you love the things you love. If you always go for ketchup chips in the convenience store, would you consider all-dressed? What is it that you like about the tang of the vinegar and the sweet and the saltiness of the tomato sauce? Is that the magic combo that gets you? And, if it is, is there something else that might hit those notes?
That line of thinking works for potato chips. How might that work for expanding your cultural point of view?
Just as you have those fundamental flavours in food to help you curate what you’re eating, you can do the same thing for what you’re consuming culturally. I did all sorts of research for the book and found you can divide cultural genres fairly cleanly into five categories that roughly correspond with sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.
So often, we consider taste in terms of good or bad. Why is it useful to think beyond those points of view?
Good taste or bad taste doesn’t make sense anymore. Those were the rules that made sense when there was one cultural arbiter of taste, when everyone was reading Life magazine in the 1950s and it told you what was good or bad. That’s obviously not the world that we live in anymore. It has become very, very personal. The leap I took in the book — the term is embodied cognition — but the best way to think about it is you don’t have a body, you are your body, and the mind and the body are very closely linked.
You provide dozens of examples in your book that illustrate how cultural tastes map on to culinary tastes. Let’s give folks some examples. What is the cultural equivalent of Coca-Cola, one of the most popular sweet drinks in the world?
In culture, sweetness is communal, it’s warm and fuzzy, the taste of innocence. Take the movie, The Notebook, even the two words you might use to describe it are saccharine or cloying, both deriving from the words sugar and sweetness. Other culturally sweet things are light rock, rom-coms or sitcoms. The note of sweetness is probably the most prevalent in all of culture.
What about a bitter drink, like coffee. What is the cultural equivalent?
Bitter is the taste of repulsion. In nature, if you taste something that is bitter, your body knows not to eat it because it could be poisonous. That’s the reaction most of us have when we taste coffee for the first time. And that’s why Frappuccinos are so popular; they are made with lots of milk and sugar to drown out the bitter taste of coffee. But gradually you might begin to like coffee and will eventually drink it black. That’s the same for bitter things in culture. Over time, you might be able to build an appreciation for them and you can get past that initial taste of repulsion and savour the intricacies. That basically covers all of high art — opera, poetry, jazz. The people who are devoted to them are intensely devoted because they have put the time and effort into to getting past the initial off-putting tang of bitterness and can enjoy the esthetic delights.
In your chapter that explores sour, you write about these crazy slush drinks sold in the Quebec-based Couche-Tard chain of convenience stores. What does that tell us about pop culture?
These drinks — called Sloche — were specifically designed to appeal to adolescent boys with flavours like windshield wiper fluid and puss and other disgusting flavours. Sour is the taste of rebellion. To be culturally sour is to be rebellious — it’s punk music, it’s Mad magazine, it’s roller coasters, stuff that doesn’t really last that long. It’s hard to make sour your entire diet; if you eat nothing but Sour Patch Kids your tongue will turn to sandpaper and your teeth will fall out. But there are certain times when you want to be woken up, then you go into sour.
From time to time, something in our culture will emerge and hit all five tasting notes and, like ketchup, become (almost) universally beloved. What’s one example of the perfect pop cultural ketchupy thing?
Star Wars. It’s a franchise that will keep on going, enrapturing new fans in every generation. You’ve got the sweetness of a team that gets together to beat the bad guys, plus familial bonds, love stories and young people being mentored by older people. You’ve got sour in that there is a rebellion. You have saltiness because you have the near-love story of Luke and Leia, who are brother and sister. There’s bitterness with the Wagnerian themes . . . and George Lucas tapping in to some primal myths. In terms of umami, there is this surfeit of details, whole universes to explore; comic books, novels, TV shows have spun out of this galaxy far, far away. Something like that can be a cultural ketchup; it’s hitting all the notes.
Is there anything in pop culture now that is just bad? Like rotten milk?
Sure, there are lots of things that are poor quality, that have spoiled like rotten milk. If you go to a restaurant and there is a hair in the soup, that is not a successful bowl of soup. You can have the same sort of lack of care or shoddy craftsmanship that goes into any work of art.
What about something like Fifty Shades of Grey? Critics hated it. Readers loved it. How do you explain a phenomenon like that?
It is, quite simply, sweet and salty. It has all the salty sex stuff in there mixed with what is basically a traditional love story. Those are the notes that are hit. Even if the sentence structure is not up to snuff, those critics are critiquing it on the wrong scale. (You can say that) any work of art is not nearly bitter enough. Well, it wasn’t supposed to be bitter. The audience wants something that is sweet and salty and the books got those things in exactly the right proportions.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Errett will be speaking at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management on Monday, Nov. 6 at 5:30 p.m. Tickets are $22, which includes a copy of his book. Register online for tickets or call (416) 978-6119.
Benjamin Errett’s Personal Tasting Notes
On the sweet front, The Hackney Colliery Band is a British brass band that does an absolutely brilliant cover of Toto’s Africa, among other hits. You can’t not dance to it. And I only found it via Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. Thanks, Spotify!
For sour, I grew up on Mad Magazine. Their parodies formed the basis of my cultural knowledge, so I would have read Deadwood Scissorham long before seeing Edward Scissorhands. And I have a lifelong addiction to Allan’s sour candies, particularly the rare varieties like Orchard Pears.
In the salty category, I doubt there’ll be a better 2017 film than Get Out. It qualifies as salty because it’s nominally a horror movie, but there are strong sweet, sour, bitter, and umami notes, hence its overall appeal.
For bitter, I really enjoyed the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Götterdämmerung earlier this year. We went with a couple of passionate Wagnerites, and their enthusiasm was contagious. It’s so bitter, there are two umlauts in the title — and neither of them is on a U!
And in terms of umami, there are a couple of British writers who hit this mark for me. Geoff Dyer and Francis Spufford alternate between fact and fiction in a way that makes them better at both. I’ll single out Spufford’s Red Plenty, an amazingly detailed novel that depicts the brief moment in the late 1950s when it genuinely looked like the Soviets could win the Cold War. Just imagine; in that alternate reality, this interview would be running in the Toronto Czar! (Sorry, that’s the aforementioned MAD influence.
— Written by Benjamin Errett