Who's the wittiest writer you've ever read?

-Terry Pratchett
-Shakespeare
-Mark Train

Each of them employs his wit in a different manner, making them incommensurable. To do them justice, I feel the need to name them all.

>Dante
>Spinoza

>Fedora

Okay I guess?

Burroughs

Seconding this. Man had a pen sharp as a scalpel and was pretty liberal in its use.

Douglas Adams.
>inb4 plebbit.

This here qt π.

William Gaddis

how do you get witty from burroughs. dont get me wrong. love burroughs. but witty?
witty for me would be mememaster wallace or maybe nabokov. lolita is super funny.

me desu

>women
>witty
I am laughing, but only condescendingly

Wilde, the bants are sublime

Peter De Vries.

PG Wodehouse, by a large margin.

Among Brits, even Max Beerbohm was wittier.

Wilde or Nabokov

no, he's not, and he ought to slip into his grave next to his mafia-friend

Shakespeare and Chaucer

Hermann Hesse

Svevo, def.

Can any of you elaborate on Wilde?

What? I don't get that reference.

Read De Profundis he has many o' witty jabs to Douglas

I'm talking about this guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_De_Vries

Not the Dutch journalist.

Max Beerbohm was much funnier than Wilde.

Chaucer, Nabokov and Wilde, definitely.

De Profundis is more whiny than witty. The whole thing was literally 100000% his fault, reading him whine and trying to rationalize his behavior and blame others is fucking sad.

The plays and Dorian Gray on the other hand...

Don't forget about the canterville ghost. It's his funniest short story; I really adore it.

ops, my bad

Read 'the decay of lying' (I believe it's something along those lines). It's full of incredibly cynical paradoxes and one such

Nabokov's humor was just an imperfect imitation of Peter De Vries. Nabokov was the better literary artist, of course.

>ctrl + f "donne"
>0 of 0

further proof Veeky Forums is illiterate. donne is literally the canonical answe rhere.

please not the fucking Morrissey Oscar Wilde meme

Decay of Lying is good.

>I am afraid that we are beginning to be overeducated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching — that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.

>The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

>Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised.

Could you please elaborate? I don't mean this in a sarcastic way. Genuinely interested in what you have to say if there's any truth behind this claim.

how???

you are fucking illiterate and you should go back to fucking Turkey

Look at the reviews of Lolita. His humor there is compared to De Vries.

You're gonna have to do a bit better than that mate.

What's wrong; you do want to read Oscar Wilde with me, right user?

Nabokov was not from Turkey, you fucking retard.

Bait or retarded? Shame them nice dubs go to waste on someone with very poor reading comprehension!

>reads "russian nobility in exile" as "turkish"
>asks other people why they are retarded
unless you're putin, you're a fucking retard. if you're putin, congratulations on your restored homeland, sir, i'll get rid of these maps.

That third quote is gold, it's the one quote from Wilde that has truly stuck with me.

Words fail Norman Mailer yet again

>All these Wilde pseuds ITT

Anyway, the obvious choice is G.K. Chesterton.

>asks other people why they are retarded
I didn't ask why you were retarded. Seriously, learn to fucking read.

...

You're a full-on mouthbreathing retard. Go back to Turkey, bitch boy.

Myself of course

>Max Beerbohm

Depends if your idea of wit runs to the epigrammatic.

Not sure if he's the wittiest, but Bierce deserves a mention.