The Wit’s Guide to Doppelgangers
Salutations and welcome to Get Wit Quick, your weekly guide to life cobbled together from great quips and loose bits. Each week’s Quote Vote sets our course, with the final destination being The Wit’s Guide To Everything, a wisecracked almanac full of clever things to think, say, and share by hitting the button below.
Let it be known that the word doppelganger was born as a twin. In the 1796 German novel Siebenkäs, the term that literally means “double goer” is defined as “people who see themselves.” But a few pages before that, a similarly spelled word is used to describe second helpings at a wedding feast. One meaning had to die so the other could live, and now no one orders their doppelganger at a restaurant.
“He led a double life. Did that make him a liar? He did not feel a liar. He was a man of two truths.”— Iris Murdoch
The best joke about a doppelganger is also a joke about misattributing great lines, so it appeals to both this newsletter and this newslëtter. Herewith: “The plays of Shakespeare were not written by Shakespeare but by another man of the same name.” It also works for Homer and has been deployed by Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson), Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemens), and many other famous aliases. Fittingly, per Quote Investigator, the joke about authorship has been passed around under other people’s names for more than a century.
“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of men.”— Jorge Luis Borges
The finest Canadian doppelganger, not that anyone asked, is of course Samuel Marchbanks, the cranky columnist dreamed up by Robertson Davies when he was running the Peterborough Examiner. In the preface to The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks, the two finally meet, and Marchbanks refuses the phrase “alter ego” because “it suggests some dreadful non-cholesterol cooking substance.” (It would also be a good name for a vegan egg substitute.) Davies concedes that the pair have struggled through their literary life like two men in a three-legged race: one of them is the writer and the other is the Doppelgänger, “and who is to say which is which?” They toast their twinned fate over drinks at the Crank and Schizoid, a tavern I’ve yet to visit.
“Canada is a country so square that even the female impersonators are women.” — Richard Benner
The late, great Dolly Parton had perhaps the best double story in modern circulation, one she understandably told on multiple occasions. Her hairdresser talked her into entering a Dolly lookalike contest at a drag club on Santa Monica Boulevard. She exaggerated everything: bigger hair, bigger beauty mark, bigger eyes. “All these beautiful drag queens had worked for weeks and months getting their clothes. So I just got in the line and I just walked across, and they just thought I was some little short gay guy,” she recalled. She lost.
“I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.”— Joan Rivers
Nowadays the terminology is digital twin, a virtual copy of a jet turbine, factory, or entire city that can be run into the virtual ground so the real thing can be saved from the same fate. It’s only a matter of time before this technology is applied to humans in a very-good, not-at-all-bad way, as depicted in the David Cronenberg documentary Dead Ringers.
“Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”— Jean Cocteau
When you discover your doppelganger living in those extra rooms of your home you only encounter in dreams, what should you do? Naomi Klein thought this through in Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, her book on mistaken identity neatly summarized by Mark Popham’s viral Naomi Mnemonic: “if the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.” Naomi Fine’s conclusion: “If you try to stab your doppelganger, you will end up bloody on the ground.” So the key is to get over both your selves, good advice even if you’re the only you there is. Or as she says, “cling a little less tightly to the self you think you are.” Especially if that self has a concealed weapon.
“I’ve seen George Foreman shadow boxing, and the shadow won.”— Muhammad Ali
I wrote an evil version of this week’s newsletter as well, but opted to only send the good one. Unless the evil one killed the good one when I wasn’t looking. As it happens, my next Parlance of Our Times column is about dupes, which are similar to doppelgangers but not exactly the same. And for next week?
Roughly once a month, my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week I want to mention a movie I haven’t seen because it’s not quite finished: Railfan. It’s described as “A film about kids who love trains and the people who love them” and I met director Ian Daffern at a party last week hosted by Substack celebrity Michael Barclay. As someone who has dragged kids who sorta like trains to the last three line openings of my local public transit system, I’ve got a soft spot for these trainspotters and hope to see this film pull into the station. They’re in the last hours of a crowdfunding campaign to get it done and you can learn more here.
🗣️ Vocab Rehab Confab! My paid subscribers also get gift link access to The Parlance of Our Times, my new language column in The Globe and Mail. Do you know what the words body count ⚰️, locking in 🔒, surfacing 🫧, copium 😮💨, and failsons 📉 mean? Do you want to? You might not, and I support that choice. But now you can!
Get Wit Quick No. 384 finds most double doubles worth neither the toil nor the trouble. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, who resents being mistaken for a crow. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The reassuringly inferior-for-now and still free sloppelganger is at getwitquicker.com. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting. If your evil twin taps the ❤️ below, let it be.
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