Talk:Wisecrack

Is there a comedian in the house?

Paging @EEng and Martinevans123: who have their work cut out ... Andrew🐉(talk) 14:23, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

"Good luck my ass." Martinevans123 (talk) 14:40, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

I hope this doesn't make AndrewD regret pinging me, but I'm not convinced this is ever going to be more than a definition. You can certainly find compendia of one-liners, clever heckles, and snappy comebacks, but all those can do is turn the page into a gigantic list of examples. It's conceivable that some reflective standup comedian or humorist has written a chapter dissecting the art of the wisecrack, but until we see that I'm afraid I don't see much hope for keeping this. <later> Twain may have something on this, and even something short by him on technique will mean this can probably squeak through, because anything Twain wrote will undoubtedly have scholarly commentary expanding on it. EEng 16:22, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Humour stops being funny when you analyse it but so it goes.

WP:DICDEF is much misunderstood. Its point is not that we should delete definitions but that we should group topics thematically rather than lexically. So, we should consider what we have for the various other words which are used to describe this:

1. barb
2. bon mot
3. comeback (retort)
4. gag (disambiguation)
5. gibe
6. jest
7. joke
8. one-line joke
9. pun
10. quip (wit)
11. rejoinder
12. sally
13. witticism

I went through this to sort out the disambiguations. The result seems to be that the best fit is wit which actually has wisecrack as a bold-faced alternative. So, do we agree that they are the same thing?

Andrew🐉(talk) 17:03, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Well certainly the above are not all the same thing e.g. pun for sure is quite distinct from the others, and a wisecrack might sometimes incorporate a bon mot but not necessarily. A wisecrack can be a retort or comeback but, again, isn't necessarily one. And so on. I don't think any of the above is a perfectly comfortable home for wisecrack, and the more I think about it the more I think this should just to consigned to Wiktionary. I have no idea from whence comes even the little text in the article now:

A wisecrack is a witty or sarcastic comment or quip. A wisecrack is used to show a person's doubts about a given assurance. For example, if one was to say to another "I wish you good luck." and the other person responded with "Good luck my ass.", this would show that the other person was not convinced that this person's wishes were sincere.

As WP's resident comedian (and the high school class clown, college cutup, and workplace wiseacre) I can assure you that that this "doubts about assurance" is completely from left field and in no particular way related to the idea of a wisecrack. If you put a gun to my head I'd give two probably-defining characteristics: a wisecrack is off the cuff, and there's the additional connotation that there's something just a bit annoying or unwelcome about it to at least some present, often the person to whom the remark is addressed.

As it happens, I said some time ago that my user page has grown to the point at which there's almost no editing situation on which it fails to bear somehow. Sure enough, see User:EEng#Museum_of_Wiseacres – now that's a wisecrack. EEng 20:58, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

P.S. I quibble with the assertion that Humour stops being funny when you analyse it. Certainly a joke that has to be explained is probably fatally crippled, and many people haven't the patience to dissect what's funny, but for those that do have the patience, the examined joke is all the more worth laughing at.

P.P.S. Looking now at wit, and seeing that it defines wisecrack as a form of wit, I'm happy with that.

Deletion?

Why was there not a deletion discussion? Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Wisecrack

Looks like a prime candidate for deletion: a definition with no sources. cagliost (talk) 09:56, 11 March 2021 (UTC)