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If I am occasionally a little overdressed, I make up for it by always being immensely overeducated.
Algernon Moncrieff, The Importance of Being Earnest
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Charming, witty and brilliant, but lazy and self-centered, the Upper Class Wit is the Upperclass Twit plus brains. He has no job and no real calling in life-- he spends his time making witticisms, flirting and pulling pranks. He has Blue Blood and just enough inherited money to support his idle lifestyle, though he's often deep in debt. On the off-chance he's gotten a job, he tends to be a Modern Major-General, or just too lazy to care.

The Upper Class Wit is an eternal bachelor, but takes great pleasure in seducing many women. Despite all the energy he puts into flirting with girls, he is very likely to be Ambiguously Gay. When portrayed sympathetically, he's a dashing rake; when unsympathetically, he's a debauched degenerate. Either way, they are typically The Hedonist.

Common in Victorian works, or anything that revolves around upper-class Brits. Upper Class Wits are often but not always British. Continental versions, like Don Juan and Casanova, tend to play up The Hedonist aspect, while the British variant is more about gentlemanly leisure.

The Rich Idiot With No Day Job is pretending to be an Upper Class Wit or an Upperclass Twit, depending. Compare Gentleman Snarker, which often overlaps. The Byronic Hero is a Darker and Edgier Upper Class Wit.

This seems to be a dying trope, since it depends on a way of life that is mostly extinct.

Examples of Upper Class Wit include:


Comic Books[]


Fanfiction[]


Film[]

  • Charles Xavier has shades of this in X Men First Class. He's from an extremely wealthy family, attends Oxford and possesses an absolutely brilliant mind-- but he prefers to use his mind-reading abilities and genius knowledge of genetics to seduce women and seems more interested in drinking than helping mankind. Even when he starts the team, he still possesses a keen wit and sense of fun (which is not to say he is in any way flippant about his beliefs). Only towards the end, when his friendship with Erik is destroyed and he is left paralyzed, does he truly become the mentor and leader we would come to know and love.

Live Action Television[]

  • Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl. He does have a job, but keep in mind that he's an eighteen-year-old hotelier who spends more time drinking, having sex, and playing mind games with everyone he knows. His excuse? "I'm Chuck Bass."
    • He's also not the eternal bachelor, but if he can't have Blair he seems determined to have every prostitute and easy girl in New York instead.
  • Warrick Harrow, Mal's client in "Shindig", from Firefly. Despite only showing up in one episode, he managed to out-snark two Upper Class Twits and Badger. Note that Simon is upper-middle class, not upper class. Doctors work for a living, whereas the upper class do not.
    • Actually, to assert that simply because Simon worked as a doctor, he cannot be considered a good subversion to this trope. The elder Tams, judging from how they treated River, seemed more the type of upperclass elitists who crave the prestige of having genius children, and not necessarily the money said successful children can bring to the family fortune. Simon himself genuinely liked being a doctor and had no qualms about emptying his bank in order to save his sister.
  • Tyrion "The Imp" Lannister starts off this way in Game of Thrones. He explains in the first episode that he uses it as "armor" against the insults of others.


Literature[]


Music[]

  • Professor Elemental, who's home is his castle because his home is a castle, would be one of these. Takes a lot of wit to make up witty rhymes about tea, after all.


Theater[]


Video Games[]

  • Final Fantasy XII has Balthier, a lovely example of the trope. It turns out he's the son of the Empire's court scientist, and that he ran away from home to escape his mad father, the Emperor's reign, and nobility in general. To his credit, he prefers living as an adventurer and actually knows how to use a sword.


Real Life[]

  • Lord Byron
  • King Charles II of England
  • John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
  • Oscar Wilde
  • Stephen Fry often gets cast in this role in the public perception (he even admits to deliberately playing up to this image in public) when in fact he's spent time in prison, had to work his ass off to get into Cambridge from a sixth form collage rather than a public school, and claims to have a very strong work ethic due to a feeling not measuring up.
  • In all likelihood, you. You're browsing TVtropes so you're obviously literary, educated and bored. Now plug your income into the Global Rich List calculator. Yep, Upper Class Wit all right.