And I couldn’t care less about its “soul”.
The quote by Emil up there is clever, with a caveat that I’ve heard the “you’re in her DMs and I’m editing her” variation before; this is a better execution of that same idea. More to the point, I wanted to use it to make a broader point about wit. Wit is mostly structural, and because of that it’s overhyped and usually bited. I will elaborate.
The advisor of my linguistics MA was a founding scholar in studying humor, and is mentioned in Steven Gimble’s Great Courses audiobook “Take My Course, Please! The Philosophy of Humor”. He has, by far, the funniest citations and footnotes I have ever read to the point where he makes you want to read them. His last name is also “Attardo”, and I don't mean to get Freakonomics about this but when you're surnamed that it's safe to say life is sink/swim about getting a sense of humor.
In “Linguistics of Humor” he recalls an incident where he repurposed the structure of a joke and it landed, but he concedes that all he did was bite it:
“Consider the following joke:
Mrs. de Gaulle enters a room where her husband is waiting. She trips on the rug and involuntarily mutters "Mon Dieu!" He replies: "How many times must I remind you? It is quite sufficient to say "Mon général."
which appears in Yvonne de Gaulle's New York Times obituary, by Frank J. Prial (Nov. 9, 1979, p. 4). One day, a student walked in my office to retrieve an exam I had returned in class. handed her her exam, which had earned a 98% score (I was famous for being a tough grader in my early days). She was surprised and exclaimed "My God!" to which I replied, "You can call me Dr. Attardo." The student was amused and, of course, I did not tell her that all I had done was contextualize the joke to her present situation. She probably thinks to this day I am very witty, but indeed very little effort was involved in recontextualizing the canned joke”
(Linguistics of Humor, pp. 17-18)
“Biting” is a term used in hip hop and comedy for a broad and nebulous copying of style, rather than a specific imitation. Instead of stealing specific jokes, it's more like stealing a style. Most wit is bited, and I'm using that past tense form deliberately so that it's not confused with “bitten.”
Take the infamous Winston Churchill joke about “haggling the price.” We can repurpose this structure in several ways. A subtle variation was a classic Regina George line in Mean Girls: “So you agree? You think you're pretty.”
But we could get more on the nose with it. Here's one:
(A wife talking to her husband during sex)
Wife: “Want me to stick a finger up your ass?”
Husband: “Yes.”
Wife: “What about a dildo?”
Husband: “Babe I'm not gay.”
Wife: “Well I think we're past that now dear.”
And here’s another:
(Two guy friends on a road trip, bored)
“Would you fuck a deer if you could fuck Ariana Grande later?”
“Probably lol”
“So what about just fucking a deer?”
“Bro wtf”
“Hey I mean, you said you could.”
The structure of this joke is (1) baiting someone with a foot-in-door, (2) highballing a much more egregious thing, and (3) forcing that person to acknowledge they're not that “type” of person. The joke gets funnier the more prudish and restrained a person is about what they're embarrassed to admit.
But infinite jokes can be derived from structure itself. Snowclones, as textual templates, are more explicitly this. Memes are more explicit than that. Wit as it’s been usually chronicled is an ancient form of snowclone. If you read “1000 witty quotes” books, you'll find endless repetition on the same themes and structures. The wittiest stuff tends to be anti-structure, but even antiwit can become formulaic in its own way because the antiwit structures are still predictable and have their own formulae, albeit more complex. To the point, artificial intelligence has a much easier time with wit than it does with delivery and flow.
Even the greatest bits don’t land when stripped of delivery and reduced to text. Delivery is what makes comedy. To give an example, I'll link a classic bit by Tom Segura and another by Hannibal Buress.
Both of these bits, when written out, are not very funny at all. Take this line:
“He got like seven lizards! That's way too many lizards. They don’t do shit, they’ve never been on Animal Planet, they’re not even famous lizards, they’re just random lizards. And they chill in my apartment all day, they have lights on them all the time, and they don’t put shit on the bills. Who are these lizards getting free lights in my house? I pay for my lights! I will fry one of these lizards and make a lizard sandwich … and flick pickle juice on it.”
Unless you hear this in Hannibal Buress’s delivery and get the setup from his previous pickle juice joke, the joke won't land like it should. It sounds boring in text. And most jokes in text do, because the funniest comedy is spoken. This isn’t because Hannibal’s not funny; in fact, the opposite is true: the funniest comedy is spoken, and people who try to make textual media their primary vehicle of comedy have failed from the start.
Or, take the way Tom Segura delivers this line about not lawyering up when questioned by the police:
“They're always like “I'm going to talk to the cops and sort this out.” You're going to do 25 to life, have fun with that man.”
Again, unless you can actually hear this it's not funny. This is why, in an indirect way, microblog jokes are overwhelmingly not funny except to people who don't really watch comedy much. They're Hehcore: jokes that make you smirk or say “tschsh” or “heh” but not actually belly laugh. (And if you've never made anyone belly laugh or struggle to, consider this wakeup motivation for getting funnier.)
All good standup comics are witty, but not all witty people are funny. Delivery is what makes comedy; wit is a lesser element. You can’t deliver like Hannibal or Tom without becoming Hannibal or Tom. To do their jokes in the way that gets laughs, you have to either bite their style or do an impression of them. This can be done tastefully: Donald Glover has a Chris Rock impression where he thematically replaces every reference to black people with references to vampires. But, usually, if you’re doing an impression of someone it’s obvious that it’s not your joke. Snowclones, memes, and yes wit too give the false comfort that you’re actually funny what you’re saying is really your joke. When you’re still at the textual level, you haven’t done anything yet.
So keep in mind the thesis here: wit is overrated, which doesn’t mean “not funny.” All great standups are witty but with more important fundamentals. Wit is portrayed as this sacred kind of comedy, presumably because it's intellectual and timeless. And for this same reason, it's perhaps the most overrated kind of humor. It can be funny, yes, but there's also plenty of moments where it's barely funny, while standup is judged by laughs exclusively. Witty quote books rarely make me belly laugh, but I can name dozens of standups who do this reliably. It’s not “low” either — the lowest form of comedy is probably Epic Fail videos or something — but lines that can be delivered in a vacuum are just a prototype for when you open your mouth. So in case this is not extremely clear by now, wit is immensely overhyped as a comedic feature. All real comedy has oration in mind. To be truly funny, you must actually talk.