A curation of witticisms. Possibly even a well-curated one. It's separated into categories and everything!

It's hard to talk about the content of a book that's entirely a collection of other people's wit. When it comes to quotes, you want something short and zippy that pushes the right cognitive synapses, which means it has to be familiar and come from somebody famous.

One-liners also need to trigger a hugely dense amount of familiarity, which means they have to resonate with beliefs and tropes already contained within the reader, ideally deeply and with much resonance.
This is what troubles me about the book.

I don't want to blame the author for the sayings of people who have come before him. But it's interesting how starkly social values are expressed when you read the same barbs in witticisms over and over and over.
Lawyers are to be hated and ideally killed.
There is nothing valuable about wives (and maybe they ought to be killed too.)
Ideal women are dim sluts, and best kept that way.

That kind of thing. It's the kind of dissonance I can't really overcome, because while this book isn't intentionally political, the idea of keeping these tropes around bothers me. There are plenty of quotations inside the book that are complex, self-directed, masterwork quips ... but they're surrounded by better and worse repetitions of themes I really hope we don't carry into the future. The quip as a lightning bolt of humour quickly became a harrowing vision of how poorly mob mentality can become be when primed with the right sayings over and over and over.

I really appreciated the gems in the book, and honestly some were so smart and cutting (and usually historical) that I'd be able to tolerate them ... but not surrounded by hundreds of repetitions on a theme that, if coming out of anyone I knew, would be horrible indeed. It's hard to enjoy this this in an uncritical collection, and it makes me ache for collections that can manage the wit and even the malevolence contained within, but as something that confronts my witticism centres and isn't just fodder to warm the tents that hold my echo chambers.

This book excels an archive of how ugly humanity, as displayed by its common witticisms (a.k.a. deferring our thought to the amazing pinnacles of others) ... but I look forward to this book being a very unattractive one in our future world. ( )