And many people need to be wary. Far more than those who are witty.

Everyone fears being the butt of a bully. It starts out in the playground when the bully mocks the small child. This is always resented but often not countered - physical weakness or timidity keeps the victim silent, or sends them off in floods of tears. The luckiest children are those who receive a small enough doses to act as a vaccine, not a fatal poison.

If the victim has any mental resource, and access to the writings of others, they may well develop an immunity to the taunts and shoves. If they are particularly lucky they may get enough boosters to become impervious - and then develop weapons of their own. The use of wit can be the most devastating one.

Every situation has humour in it - every person has a target for a joke at their expense, however small or concealed it may be. The skilled wit can see the situation and target in an instant, and then can decide whether to play or not. Be assured that there are far more times when a true wit is silent than when they speak or write...they may have as much of human kindness as the next person. It is not all sour cream and hard cheese.

Gentle humour is something that can be shared by all. In it, the foibles of humanity can be touched on, but no-one needs to feel that they are particularly struck. That is, unless they are so sensitive on some secret point that the mere mention of it triggers them. You can sometimes see a person at a recital of chamber music or a harp concert jump up and wildly tear at their clothes, screaming obscenities. They have issues, and you are seeing the external signs. A kind person will throw a cloak of silence over the scene - a wit will turn a spotlight and fire hose on them.

Pointed humour can dodge through a largely uncaring crowd to do exactly this sort of thing, and do it a lot faster. Watching the colour leave the cheeks of the victim, to be replaced by a violent purple and beads of cold sweat, is one of the joys of the humourist. If the situation involves an audience who can be expected to shriek or sneer in sympathy with the speaker, the thing may be played out almost in pantomime. Apoplexy is not really a medical thing these days, so you are free as a layman to cause it as you like.

Written humour is a delicate thing - dangerous to all, as it has fuse pockets on either end of the body of the joke. You may find it blows up in your face as readily as in the face of the intended recipient. Printed jokes are durable, and some damn near indelible. I got away with a few in the early days of this column but found out how erase them when I realised how much ammunition they provided for revenge.

Deliberately acid wit may be seen as malicious. It might be harmful, but it need not be as malign as the delicate would have. It can, like Juvenal's satires, be aimed at an improvement of society. Some vitriolists do it to exorcise their own daemons - some do it to exercise them. Some do it because they cannot get enough print space in suburban newspapers to keep their image before the public.

I do it to demand payments with menaces. So far I have $ 2.14. The menaces are pretty innocuous.

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