My three friends and I were driving to a music festival. My friend, seeing a police car parked on the street, instantaneously responded: “There’s my ride home.”

There’s something beautiful about one-liners: a perfect narrative compression of the situation, an almost poetic ability to synthesize while retaining information (I compare poetry to lossless data compression: a way to say to much in so few words). They are closely related to the concept of wit: the ability to comment on a situation with insight and humor. Probably the most extreme — and hilarious — example of that relation were “the battles of the wits” that my friends would engage in: a dialogue where each subsequent response built upon the previous but towered over it in wit. Unsurprisingly, the dialogue consisted almost entirely of one-liners.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 12:56 and is filed under art, clever, funny, reductions, whatis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.