In the late 1960s, a bearded sometime educator named Ashleigh Brilliant stood on a milk crate in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. From that perch, he mused (and sometimes sang) to passers-by about life, death, marijuana, freedom and many other subjects.
“I feel acutely aware of the ludicrous image I must be projecting,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1968.
But, he added, “I’m only exercising my constitutional right to be a jackass, a right whose enjoyment should by no means be restricted to state governors and college presidents.”
Over the next six decades, existential, witty and paradoxical notions that he called Pot-Shots or Brilliant Thoughts poured out of him. Or at least until 2005, when he reached a self-imposed cap of 10,000 epigrams and wrote, “You are now leaving the universe — come again!”
While Mr. Brilliant never truly stopped — he kept writing lines that he emailed to friends — among the official 10,000 are these:
No. 519: “I feel much better now that I’ve given up hope.”
No. 826: “I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.”
No. 1,150: “In order to discover who you are, first learn who everybody else is — and you’re what’s left.”
No. 3,017: “Just because I’m happy doesn’t mean you couldn’t make me happier.”
Mr. Brilliant called himself “history’s only full-time, professional, published epigrammist.”
He died at 91 on Sept. 24 in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he had lived since 1973. His death, in a hospital, was announced by Stacey Wright, his friend and trustee.
Mr. Brilliant and his wife, Dorothy, built a business out of his thoughts, Brilliant Enterprises. Some years, he earned as much as $100,000 from imprinting his phrases on postcards (his biggest seller), greeting cards, mugs, T-shirts, bumper stickers and tote bags, to name just a few vehicles for his work, and selling them nationally. (Australia was another market.) His customers included the publishing heiress turned gun-toting revolutionary Patricia Hearst and Jim Bakker, the disgraced televangelist.
Mr. Brilliant licensed his witticisms to Hallmark, GoComics, defeatdespair.com (a blog devoted to fighting hopelessness) and other companies; collected them in 10 books, each with one of his epigrams as its title; and syndicated them, with illustrations, as a single-panel comic to a small group of newspapers.
His phrasemaking was guided by several rules. Brevity was one: His lines were conveyed in 17 or fewer words. Simplicity was another: They had to translate easily into other languages, and so Mr. Brilliant ordained that they contain “no rhyme, rhythm, idioms, puns or other wordplay.”
“I call my Pot-Shots philosophical pornography because they strip the soul instead of the body,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. “They’re outrageousness disguised as wit.”
Mr. Brilliant sometimes ventured beyond 17 words. He wrote extensively about his life on his website, where he printed pages from his detailed diaries. In 2016, he wrote to Tim Buckley, then the editor of The Montecito Journal, asking if he could write essays for that California weekly newspaper. He did them, under the rubric Brilliant Thoughts, until his death.
In an interview, Mr. Buckley recalled Mr. Brilliant telling him that he was best known for never writing more than a sentence.
“And then he turned in his first column and it was exactly 750 words,” Mr. Buckley said. “He never missed a week, and every single one was 750 words.”
Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant was born in London on Dec. 9, 1933. His father, Victor, was a career civil servant, and his mother, Amelia (Adler) Brilliant, oversaw the home. Concerned about the political tensions percolating in Europe, she took Ashleigh and his sister, Myrna, to visit her mother in Toronto in 1939 and remained there when World War II broke out.
Ashleigh’s father joined them after he had survived the torpedoing of a ship he was aboard by a German submarine in late June 1941. He worked for the British Admiralty’s delegation, and the family moved to Washington later in 1941. They went back to England after the war ended.
Ashleigh received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of London in 1955. Returning to the United States, he earned a master’s degree in education from Claremont College in California in 1957 and a Ph.D in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964.
In the mid-1950s and ’60s, he held jobs as a teacher, including as an associate professor of history for a semester at what is now Central Oregon Community College, in Bend. There, in 1965, he was at the center of a brouhaha over free speech when, at a meeting of a literary society he had formed, he played a recording of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reciting his classic poem “Howl,” which contains vulgar words.
The poem offended the college’s president, who dissolved the society and chose not to renew Mr. Brilliant’s contract. The American Civil Liberties Union spoke up for Mr. Brilliant, but the decision stood.
“It was certainly unfair; it was worse than unfair, it was stupid,” he told The Bulletin, a newspaper in Bend, in 2002, when he was invited back to the campus to deliver a lecture about free speech.
Soon after, Mr. Brilliant was teaching at Chapman College in Orange County, Calif., where he met Dorothy Tucker, a fellow teacher. They moved to San Francisco in 1967, settling in the Haight-Ashbury district, and married the following year. She died in 2018. He left no immediate survivors.
In 1967, the syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman encountered Mr. Brilliant on a street in Haight-Ashbury telling passers-by, “I’m a human jukebox — put a quarter in me and I’ll play.” When someone did, Mr. Brilliant sang about marriage and marijuana, to the tune of the folk song “Cielito Lindo.”
As Mr. Brilliant’s milk-crate philosophizing made him into what he called a “public thinker,” he began to write his sayings on postcards — an outgrowth of the titles he had been giving to paintings he was making at the time. In 1968, Herb Caen, a popular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote, “The No. 1 seller, both here and in L.A., among Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot-Shot Greeting Cards is the one that reads ‘It’s really quite a simple choice — life, death or Los Angeles.’”
Mr. Brilliant copyrighted all of his Pot-Shots and defended them — in letters, threats to sue and even lawsuits — when he felt his rights had been violated. He settled more than 130 infringements.
In one case, he challenged Random House and the news anchor David Brinkley over the 1996 book “Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion,” a collection of Mr. Brinkley’s commentaries.
The title was alarmingly close to Mr. Brilliant’s epigram No. 461, which he copyrighted in 1974: “Everybody is entitled to my opinion.”
Random House paid him $1,000. Mr. Brinkley called it a “shakedown.” In 1997, Mr. Brinkley spoke to The Wall Street Journal about the affair and Mr. Brilliant. “I don’t want to get into it,” he said, “because I don’t want him coming back at me. We’ve paid him off. Now I just want to get rid of him.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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