Do not be witty at the cost of others: it is easy but hateful. All men have their revenge on such an one by speaking ill of him, and as they are many and he but one, he is more likely to be overcome than they convinced... He that speaks ill will always hear worse.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The cheap wit that scores off other people is easy to reach for and expensive to have used. It wins a laugh and makes an enemy, and the arithmetic is fatal: the scandal-monger is one person, and everyone he mocks is part of the many, so the revenge always outnumbers the offence. He is more likely to be buried under the ill spoken of him than to convince anyone of the ill he speaks. Making cruelty your entertainment, and therefore your habit, marks you as untrustworthy even to those who laugh along, because they know their own turn is coming. The rule is plain: do not make other people the raw material of your wit, because the one who speaks ill will always, in the end, hear worse of himself.
Practice
- Decline the cheap laugh at someone's expense; it is easy and it is hateful, and it makes a lasting enemy for a moment's wit.
- Remember the arithmetic: you are one, the mocked are many, and the many always outspeak the one (maxim 187 routes real criticism through process, not sneers).
- Never make cruelty your theme; even those who laugh with the backbiter learn to distrust him, knowing their turn is next.
Use this when
- Use this restraint especially where wit comes easily to you; the sharper your tongue, the more it will cost when it turns on people.
- Use it online and in groups, where a cutting line spreads and is remembered long after the target is forgotten.
Ignore this when
- Don't confuse honest, necessary criticism with scandal-mongering; naming a real problem to the right person is not sneering to a crowd (maxim 210 doses the truth).
- Don't stay silent about genuine wrongdoing out of this rule; the target is cruelty-as-entertainment, not accountability.
A picture of it
Known for a sharp tongue, a manager builds a reputation on the cutting aside, the witty demolition of absent colleagues that reliably lands a laugh in the room. What he cannot see is the ledger accumulating against him: every person he has filleted for sport is now one of the many, and they speak of him, when he is absent, exactly as he spoke of them. When a senior role opens, the laughter he collected counts for nothing against the settled consensus that he cannot be trusted near anyone's reputation. He was one wit against a hundred memories, and the hundred won.
Wit at others' expense buys a laugh and a hundred enemies. The one who speaks ill will always hear worse.