Clive Anderson (Introducing Grep Proops on Whose Line Is it Anyway): “And here is the man who Dr. Spooner refers to as a shining wit.”
I just fell off my chair, SpectBrain! 
Thanks for sharing it. This one gets my vote as Best in Thread.
And a perfect example of “dry humor”. tick, tick, BOOM!
I second the nomination. If brevity is the soul of wit, then that particular comeback is the supreme being of sal atticus.
Author Kurt Vonnegut’s brother Bernard Vonnegut discovered “cloud seeding”–inserting silver iodine into clouds to make it rain or snow.
Wrong thread, Annie?
Clever, yes, but not exactly “dry.”
Damn :smack: I opened the wrong window
No, I’m fairly certain it’s “Which Tyler”
There are some lines delivered by More in “A Man for All Seasons” that are extremely dry wit.
WOLSEY: The King wants a son; what are you going to do about it?
MORE: (Dry murmur) I’m very sure the King needs no advice from me on what to do about it.
WOLSEY: More! You should have been a cleric!
MORE: (Amused, looking down from gallery) Like yourself, Your Grace?
MORE: The world must construe according to its wits. This Court must construe according to the law.
MORE: Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!
Bertrand Russell also used dry wit. His essay “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” has several examples. Here’s one. “Toplady, the author of ‘Rock of Ages,’ moved from one vicarage to another; a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt down, with great loss to the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but what the new vicar did is not known.”
This has to be one of the nicest things ever said about me. Thanks!
I was so hoping you’d see this. I know I’ve said so before, but your sense of humor is one of the pleasures of reading this message board. It never fails that you will have a fresh slant, often with a fresh way of saying it, on topics that could otherwise be quite dull and so-so.
It’s only after you have spoken that I get the impression that the topic – whatever it may be – has been dealt a strong dose of reality and relevance. As often as not, your observations will let the air out of what might otherwise be pompous bullshit.
I’m a fan!
You make me sound smert.
Read this one in a CS thread a while back, can’t seem to find it now. One 1950s movie actress said of another: “I knew her before she was a virgin.”
The object was Doris Day, and I remember it that the speaker was male. Closest I can get, though.
Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, the two gay wunderkind authors of the 1940s, cordially despised each other for more than 30 years. Vidal, by far the more litigious and less self-destructive (and imo incomparably more talented at essay/incomparably less talented at fiction of the two) usually came off the better in their Battles of the Bitches. (On Capote’s voice: “Imagine what a brussels sprout would sound like if a brussels sprout could talk”.)
Vidal once sued Capote for libel and swore under oath that he had last seen Capote at a party where he sat on his lap. When asked why he said “I mistook him for a footstool.” When asked why he got off of Capote’s lap he stated “To move to another footstool.”
Entertaining Susan Sarandon and others at his home in Italy who have attested to the validity of the quote, upon learning from the TV news that Capote had died of an overdose Vidal stated “Well. He finally made a good career move.”
Other Vidalia:
On Ronald Reagan (long before he died): “A triumph of the embalmer’s art.”
“In Hollywood and D.C., no good deed ever goes unpublished.”
“I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”
“Fifty percent of the American public never read a newspaper. Fifty percent of them do not vote. Let us hope it is the same fifty percent.”
"Most public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books. There is some evidence that they can’t read them either. "
On Andy Warhol: “He is the only genius on Earth with an IQ of 60.”
My favorite: “There is no problem on Earth so great it could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
Indeed, the comeback without hesitation is essential for dry wit.
“The jerk store called; they’re running out of you!”
On a similar note to Doris Day’s revenant maidenhead, Blake Edwards was having a discussion at a party in the late 1960s when somebody mentioned Julie Andrews (then on the shortlist of box office superstars due to Sound of Music and Mary Poppins) for a role in the movie he was planning. He scoffed due to her goody-two-shoes image that “she’s so sweet she probably has violets growing between her legs”.
A mutual acquaintance relayed the joke to Andrews, who immediately phoned a florist and had a bouquet of violets delivered to him with the note “I picked these for you myself”. He thought it was hysterical, asked her for a date, and he’s had his nose in the violets since 1969.
An example of dry wit from, of all things, The Benny Hill Show:
ARMY OFFICER: So, you want to join the army, do you?
OBVIOUS FLAMING QUEER: Yeth, pleathe.
AO: Do you think you could . . . kill a man?
OFQ: Eventually.