Painting of thirty-five expressive heads.

Thirty-Five Expressive Heads, by Louis-Léopold Boilly, c. 1825. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing, France.

Comedy

Volume VII, Number 1 | winter 2014

Miscellany

Dorothy Parker was once asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence. “You can lead a horticulture,” she replied, “but you can’t make her think.”

It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse—the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.

—Cicero, c. 44 BC