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(08-21-2015, 04:18 PM)Ignacius Wrote: Because wit isn't inflicted, it's received. Â Lower class wit, just because no one recorded it, didn't suddenly cease to exist. Â It had nothing to do with proper speech, even in England (especially because the nobles and countrymen weren't even speaking the same language). Â If my friend turns to me and says something witty about a local building commission, his wit didn't just vanish or never exist, his wit just wasn't recorded for everyone to hear.
So it's existed since the dawn of complex conversation. Â It was certainly already happening, pretty much in the form we receive it as today, in ancient Greece (which is where we got the tradition).
And when you say you want your character to be witty, as per the OP, you're writing towards that standard. Â And when you fail, it isn't a matter of just broadening our horizons to make "lol u dum" a superlative repartee considering the writers' perceived education, either it resonates or it doesn't. Â And when it doesn't, and someone keeps pushing it, of course people are going to call it trolling. Â They'll OOCly tell this guy to stop, that they're trying to RP, that interrupting them to troll them isn't funny. Â And they won't care whether that player is trying as hard as he can or actually is trolling them because they can't judge the writer, just the effect.
However, as you can see, that effect clearly depends largely on the writer's ability. Â If he thinks he knocked it out of the park and everyone else found him boorish, he's not witty any more than I'm six feet tall. Â He just doesn't understand the effect as it's received. Â If people thought he was intelligent, but unlikable, they're likely to RP with him figuring he's being played straight up. Â If he doesn't sound intelligent but wants to, he's not meeting his goal.
And, again, the issue is whether we should say he's witty as long as he's intending it to be read that way. Â Can you, essentially, meta in subjective conversational perception. Â I'd say no, not in an open social context. Â You can only shoot for the top and understand if you can't make the bar you set that it isn't the audience's fault.
And how you receive that wit - how you determine whether that response is witty or not - is going to be based on linguistic markers that are culturally determined, and, in this case, were determined by historical issues of class, education and speech. These issues are also much more historically recent than what you're describing - the connection between wit as in wittiness and the intellect is an Enlightenment-era conceit. "Wit" as a term doesn't even enter the lexicon as a specific marker of cleverness until the late 13th century.
What the lower-classes said may well have been thought of as funny, but as we've already established, funny and witty aren't necessarily the same thing.
My grasp of the Poetics is lacking, to be clear, so I don't doubt that the Greeks introduced the idea of wit into Western thought; however, how we perceive wit is a product of modernity, not of Classical thought.
And yes, it really is a matter of broadening horizons. If it connects or it doesn't, ask yourself why it does doesn't. It's certainly not because the writer is necessarily stupid, or smart, or has failed/managed to connect to some essential quality of a social marker that's existed since time immemorial.
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