The Age of Incompetence 3

One of the things I like best about Kasey's treatment of competence is his proposal of wit as a quality that vaults the poem over the walls of the ordinary while still acknowledging the virtues of the generic. Here's Kasey's initial formulation:

"If it were possible to state the relationship between competence and wit in terms of an equation, it might be something like wit = competence + awareness of the inadequacy of competence. This automatically suggests that irony plays a part in wit. I...