Under the banner of wit, irony develops the ‘play on words’ able to strip a situation of its dramatic value. Once again we shall use Sterne as our model. At a certain point in the story, the protagonist engages in a series of clichés on life as a preparation for death, and behind which we see the profile of Robert Burton, the author of Anatomy of Melancholy. Upon illustrating his epigraph, Tristram adds an entirely black, or - as he states - "marbled", page to the novel. Hence, a first method of wit: reducing to the banality of everyday occurrences that which, if conveyed to the abstract regions of the language, always creates a sacred aura of its own. Short parentheses, terse punctuation, the constant substitution of subordinates with ‘expressive’ coordinating nexes: all that which in Sterne prepares the comic effect of the marbled page, passes through the seriousness of the philosophical treatise. Thus it is a question of finding out in what way the other cultures interpreted the tribunitial position – and also the same ‘disturbing’ value, as regards power, in the collective unconscious – that Burton adopted in the Anglo-Saxon area. In Italian, Vico’s syntactical structure and Marino’s obstinate ‘nominalism’ can constitute a satisfactory approach. In France, Racine and Boileau are required. In Germany, Lessing’s pre-eminence is undisputed. In Spain, it is easier: the succinct subtlety of Gongora can be assumed with objective openness.
An example summing up all our discourse under the banner of wit is offered by a passage from Chesterton, certainly one of greatest masters of the genre: "It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan". Here we see the second method of wit, as opposed to the first: language as a tool for negating the reality of everyday things. The effect on ‘usual meaning’ is disruptive: one is led to remove all meaning from social discrimination, the public qualities of any individual, the sense of honour that has always accompanied the social aspects of a man. Through the unaffected irony of wit, the humour of ‘mask’ and that which, through parody, aims to deconstruct any linguistic context, unite against the ethical mortification produced by clichés. The pomposity with which class prejudice is developed clearly shows how many preconceived ideas exist in every value judgement, even if linguistically disciplined. "A great deal of difference" can be rendered in Italian as "un grande cimento discriminatorio", if one wishes to fully observe that aftertaste of Victorian pomposity on which the passage feeds. In the end, everything reduces to a dialectic of empty names: something that seems like an extension to all the linguistic contextualism of the Aristophanic "brekekek koax koax".