The Repartee

I envy clever people. Try as I might I simply cannot summon the wit I have seen on full display in Bond flicks and assorted youtube clips. If someone needles me in a bar or at a party, I can’t think of a decent riposte until well after the moment has past – sometimes weeks later in the shower. There have been more than a few times I would be sitting quietly at a restaurant reading a book when I would suddenly sit bolt upright and scream “I didn’t ask you to dance, I said you looked fat in those pants!” But, I was completing a quip from three nights earlier, and now I have to pay my bill lay down track before everyone at the diner thinks I went off my meds.

Clever is often used as a byword for intelligence, which isn’t true. Intelligence concerns itself with knowledge, a calculated amount of data and one’s ability to assimilate more data. Cleverness is using whatever data you have in creative ways. Too often I have heard people miscatagorized as ‘clever’ because they can speck several languages or because they graduated collage. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are clever, it might mean that they have an ear for grammar or that they learned to play the game, and certainly worth of their success. But all I can say is that the entertainment industry is administered by people with degrees form prestigious universities and I would in no way categorize Rock of Love as being clever.

If one where to ask me which of the two you would prefer, Zach, clever or intelligent, I would simply say this; Kim Ung Yong is smart and Bill Clinton is clever. Now, which name did you have to google and which one got laid like spring break?

So how do you know if you are clever? What is the standard candle for measuring it? Some people may tell you to consider the professional success of a given person as an indicator but I would disagree again. The utter randomness of life has taught me that success can be hewn from many different sources, not just the merit of cleverness. I have literally met people that shouldn’t be living unassisted thrust into roles of authority for a myriad of justifications ranging from familial connections, right place/right time situations, and the ever popular silly dumb luck. It’s when I come face to face with an odd or counterproductive policy put in place because the decision maker had no better qualification than the fact that he was on the bosses bowling team, that I get filled with such white hot rage that I wonder if this will be the time I finally stroke out. I don’t know about you guys but I do not want to punch my timeclock while yelling at the Microsoft customer service representative and ruining my tiny house with my anger.

A good litmus test for the clever is their pets, specifically, pet names. There is something strangely final once you have chosen a name for a pet and if your chose poorly everyone who comes to your house and pets them will know you lack imagination. My cat’s name in Vincent Von Kickass because I was forced to pick one at the vet, and my friend has a cat named Chairman Meow. I feel sorry for my cat. He could have easily gotten a better name if only I had been doing something, anything, while I was naming him. Depending on what was on my ipod, he could have just as well been named Robert Smith, or Dr. Strangelove, or Goody Two Shoes. I was watching the first season of Rome when I came close to tears over the regret of not naming my cat Pompey Magnus.

All you can really do is read the recommended books and watch clever television, locate little instances of wit and squirrel it away until you can spring it on someone who, hopefully doesn’t go to the same source material as you.