SOURCE: Sheed, Wilfrid. “The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker.” In The Good Word and Other Words, pp. 159-63. New York: Dutton, 1978.

In the following discussion, Sheed argues that the wit of Kaufman and Parker should not be thought of as a compensation for or expression of a psychoneurosis, but that as writers they deliberately created recognizable and marketable brands of wit.

The lives of the wits make grim reading these days. To judge from John Keats's You Might as Well Live, Dorothy Parker had a wretched loveless childhood, got her own back at the world with some fine wisecracks, and came to a miserable end. According to Howard Teichmann's George S. Kaufman, little George was coddled and frightened into helplessness, learned to fight back with some splendid wisecracks, and came to a pitiable end.

Both stories may be true for all I know. The odds...