Wit and wisdom

“The world would not be in such a snarl/If Marx had been Groucho instead of Karl.” That remark by Irving Berlin is No. 2,135 of “The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said” by Robert Byrne. It’s a new book without page numbers. To find a humorous quote, indices refer to the authors and to the subject matter. Berlin’s quote is in the section on politics. The section opens with “Thank heavens we don’t get all the government we pay for.” That’s a Will Rogers line. Rogers appears 12 times in Byrne’s book — less than more modern humorists such as Woody Allen, Dave Barry and George Carlin. Groucho got eight listings. Karl Marx has only one. While working on “Das Kapital,” he said, “I could be through with the whole economic crap in five weeks … this is beginning to bore me.” Boredom itself gets a nod. Voltaire: “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.” We’ll give the last words to the legal profession. “If it were not for the lawyers,” said A.K. Griffin, “we wouldn’t need them.”

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