Wit’s End juggles scholarship, humorous anecdote and critical insight with a diabolical, almost sinister dexterity. No shrinking violet, Geary fully intends to strut his stuff, to glitter and beguile, and he does so with remarkable ingenuity and chutzpah ... the advancing text kaleidoscopes from philosophical dialogue to sermon to scholarly paper to ode to an over-the-top emulation of 1920s African American jive. The book’s designer even complements this narrative jazziness by varying the typefaces and page layouts. Geary’s intellectual reach is just as dizzying. He parses both enigmatic Buddhist koans and the put-downs used in playing the Dozens, the African American game of competitive insults ... Geary’s aim isn’t to make you laugh (or grimace), it’s to make you think. To begin with, he grants the pun a kind of foundational primacy, viewing it as the template for every sort of wit ... Geary’s scholarship, supported by 30 pages of endnotes identifying his sources, could easily be heart-sinking, if his own prose wasn’t so frisky ... Geary manages to be both [serious and witty], as one might expect from an avid juggler whose day job is working as deputy curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation.

Although Mr. Geary keeps returning to the subject of puns and their capacity to fold 'a double knowledge into words,' he ranges wide ... Crucially, instead of analyzing wit to death, Mr. Geary chooses to embody it. Each of his chapters is written in a particular form that wit frequently takes. One chapter is a stand-up routine ... Another is an illustrated lecture on the trompe l’oeil ... Mr. Geary writes not just playfully but also with panache ... Mr. Geary’s chief success is in conveying the power of wit to refresh the mind.

Wit’s End sometimes treats these [examples of puns] the way Freud treated dream images: as supercharged particles, burls that mark the convergence of multiple trains of thought ... Geary is a keen storyteller, promiscuous with quotes and figures. One could do worse at a cocktail party than simply opening his book at random and reading aloud ... Occasionally [Geary] falters badly: his 'Hamilton'-inspired rap contains the line 'Wit. It’s the shit. Wit. It’s so lit.' For the most part, though, the formal shifts playfully enact the notion of wit as 'improvisational intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place.'

Readers roaring with laughter at outrageous puns one moment find themselves carefully assessing psychological studies the next, only to then spin into the wild linguistic creativity of jive. Geary’s own puckish style—mischievous and unpredictable—itself sparkles with wit as it provides the thread stringing together these variegated beads, all strikingly different, yet all remarkably similar in illuminating how wit exposes hidden truths, awakens dormant capacities. An exhilarating romp, entertaining and enlightening.

...an entertaining exploration of how intellectual dexterity manifests itself in both verbal and visual form ... In Wit's End, James Geary is undaunted by the risk anyone writing about the subject of being funny takes: spoiling the joke by explaining it. Refreshingly, he shows here that he's fully equal to the task, enhancing our appreciation of how true wit can both amuse and enlighten.

In the many essays that comprise Wit’s End, however, it’s unclear whether Geary wants to entertain or to inform ... The thin veneer of conceit within these pages tends to distract from the vast amount of information [Geary] offers, generating literary whiplash ... At the end, the reader may feel as if she has wandered into a disorganized, but occasionally amusing, bookish buffet. There are a multitude of wit-identified choices but the proportions of the selections seem off. It won’t take many pages to speculate that the underlying agenda may be to demonstrate the irresistible and cultured badinage of the author, himself ... Wit’s End is a cross between a college lecture and a stand-up routine. The reader has to wade through a lot of tall corn for a laugh or two. In this rambling journey from Greek mythology, to the Talmud, to jazz, less might have been better.

A playful book ... The use of different styles for each chapter is sometimes too clever for its own good, but one is likely to come away from the book convinced of many of the author’s arguments ... Many of the anecdotes are hilarious ... 'To see clearly, look askance,' Geary advises. He heeds his own advice to entertaining effect.