Drawing attention to the complex reciprocal relationship between commercialized leisure and commercial literature in the so-called "Age of Wit," this essay reconceives of the witty and witless in two important ways. Taking for granted, first of all, that wit is usually analyzed in terms of the efficacy of verbal language, the essay examines how and why debates concerning true and false wit were played out in physical terms-in this case, through the motions, gestures, and attitudes of the dancing body. Second of all, the essay attempts to account for the enduring, if unwitting, attractions of "false wit" by likening it to the tricks and transformations of contemporary English pantomime. Satirists of the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s frequently invoke the unmeaning motion of Harlequin as a visual way of proscribing the verbal excesses of extravagant language. At the same time, apologists for pantomime associate Harlequin's "dumb Wit" with truth, reason, and the pattern of nature, claiming that the genre's corporeality allowed it to transcend the limitations and equivocations of words. The essay concludes that the popularity of pantomime contextualizes the Augustan reaction against false wit, in that it identifies a source of aesthetic pleasure in the public's eagerness to be duped by apparent sameness in difference. Early eighteenth-century readers enjoy luxuriant, illogical, and mixed metaphors, forced similes, and trifling jibes and quibbles for the same reason that early eighteenth-century spectators delight in the unexpected turns of pantomimic entertainment: in a world under the sway of Harlequin's magical slapstick, audiences derive satisfaction from being deceived.
