wit's end: a book talk about humor by james geary (harvard NIeman Foundation deputy curator)
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Talk begins at 7:30 PM @ Powell's City of Books
Free and open to the public. There is no organized Harvard meeting for this event. Wear Crimson colors and look for other alumni!
https://www.powells.com/book/wits-end-9780393357592/1-2
In Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It (W. W. Norton), James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Adopting a different style for each chapter – from dramatic dialogue to sermon, heroic couplets to a barroom monologue – Geary embodies wit in all its forms. Wit’s End agilely balances psychology, folktale, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, demonstrating that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.
About the Author
James Geary is the deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, editor of Nieman Reports, and former editor of the European edition of Time magazine. He is the author of Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, and The Body Electric: An Anatomy of The New Bionic Senses.