clipped from www.ashleighbrilliant.comMr. Brilliant Wrote Them – And Copyrighted Them:
By Amy Stevens
From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JANUARY 6, 1992 .
Here's a quiz, and a wrong answer could cost you thousands of dollars. Who penned the line: "When all else fails…Eat"?
(a) Will Rogers. (b)Your Aunt Millie. (c) Who knows? (d) Ashleigh Brilliant.
Mr. Brilliant has dreamed up and copyrighted thousands of one liners. The result: When the Funny Side Up catalog offered underwear emblazoned with the uncredited epigram "I May Not Be Perfect, But Parts of Me Are Excellent," he threatened to sue their pants off. But before Mr. Brilliant could file any briefs, the company sent him $1,000 and agreed to stop selling the offending garment. Funny Side Up declines comment.
A former college history professor and one-time Haight-Ashbury hippie, the 58 year old Mr. Brilliant has copyrighted such lines as "Even weeds have needs" and 5,631 others, which he markets on hand lettered postcards, on a few licensed products, in books and in a syndicated panel carried by about a dozen newspapers.
Since 1967, when he came up with "Let's keep the Christ in Chrysler" (never a best seller, he concedes, but "very popular in Detroit"), Mr. Brilliant has produced an average of one Brilliant Thought, as he dubs them, every 36 hours. To qualify as a Brilliant Thought, an epigram must conform to a rigid code: no reference to fads or fashion, no rhyme used for its own sake, no puns, and nothing that isn't easily translatable. "Nothing that poets use," he says. There's also a limit of 17 words, a tribute to the number of syllables in Japanese haiku and an early observation that he'd never used more than 16 words anyway, but wanted a spare for emergencies.
Mr. Brilliant likes to take a common phrase, break off the stem and graft on something that twists in a new direction. "I start with something and then try to complete the thought in a totally unexpected way," he says. One example: "No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas."
If Mr. Brilliant -- that's his real name -- sounds a bit eccentric, you wouldn't get an argument from locals. He conducted an unsuccessful campaign for the Santa Barbara city council entirely in song in 1977, and got 2,000 votes, placing him eighth in a field of 11. He won a contest to write new lyrics for the Chiquita banana song, "the supreme creative achievement of my life," but became incensed when the winning entry wasn't actually used. Sample lyrics:
"Life, no matter what your plan is,
Can be better with banan-as. . . .
But it's dangerous and unsightly to be careless with the peel of a banana,
Two years ago, Mr. Brilliant reviewed 14 months of entries in Reader's Digest's "Quotable Quotes" and found he'd edged out Mark Twain for first place, with five. A magazine spokesman notes that since Mr. Brilliant's first saying appeared in 1980, he actually trails Mr. Twain 21 to 13, but leads Will Rogers by two. The magazine paid Mr. Brilliant $50 for each.
While Mr. Brilliant attempts to make the prose timeless, it wasn't until 1979 that the legal system helped make it profitable. In a case against a heat-transfer decal company that appropriated three expressions (including "I have abandoned my search for the truth and am now looking for a good fantasy"), a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Mr. Brilliant's works were "epigrams" entitled to full copyright protection, as distinct from mere "short phrases," which can't be copyrighted.
Mr. Brilliant caught 3M using epigram No. 212, "All I want is a little more than I'll ever get," on its pads of Post-it Notes. He sent a letter to the company, which paid a $6,000 license fee and promised a share of royalties. The company says it isn't using the saying anymore.
In October, a local restaurant, Cliff's & Co., distributed a newsletter bearing an unattributed saying, "I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once." Mr. Brilliant fired off a letter to the restaurant's owners pointing out that he is the registered copyright owner. The restaurant promised to print an apology and never use the epigram again. Reached by telephone, a man who would identify himself only as part-owner of the restaurant says the matter was settled to avoid bad publicity. "No way did Ashleigh Brilliant make that up," the man says, "I was there when a customer at the bar made it up, and he told it to me."
Mr. Brilliant says he has never pirated others' works. "If I think there's any likelihood that anyone said it first, I won't use it," he says.
Occasionally, outsiders submit unsolicited suggestions for Mr. Brilliant's line of "Pot-Shots" postcards. But he hasn't liked a single one. He even tried to train his wife of 23 years, Dorothy, to think Brilliant Thoughts, but it didn't work. On some private gauge, no one else measures up. "It should sound like something that somebody might say, but it should be something that nobody has ever said before," he says. "It's got to be universal and perpetual."
But an untrained eye can't always distinguish between high art and a bumper sticker. "Are we having fun yet?" isn't one of his. But "I think I'm enjoying what I think is happening," just happens to be Brilliant Thought No. 1942. What's the difference? "The reason that's on a bumper sticker is that it's a take-off on what kids say, whereas, 'I think I'm enjoying what I think is happening' this is a profound comment on the nature of reality." Mr. Brilliant explains. "Surely you can see the difference."
Every morning, Mr. Brilliant takes a two to four hour stroll. Hr carries a pen and paper and tunes his headset to talk radio, a source of ideas. Sometimes he's inspired by chance encounters or fragments of an overheard conversation. Recently, Mr. Brilliant happened upon a young couple arguing in the parking lot of the Jolly Tiger restaurant. "The woman shouted, 'I'm not going to answer you if you talk to me like that!'" Mr. Brilliant recalls. He immediately jotted: "If you want a kind answer, you should ask a kind question." Later he modified it further: "If you must ask an unkind question, at least try to ask it in a kind way."
Mr. Brilliant is slight and a bit stooped, with a fuzzy beard and a habit of gazing shyly downward while speaking. He has the reedy voice of an old man, and doesn't use it much without being prompted. But open-ended questions often elicit a new epigram. Explaining his behavior in an interview, for instance, Mr. Brilliant responds: "If I'm maladjusted, I guess I'm well adjusted to my maladjustment."
Might that off-the-cuff quip become a copyrighted Brilliant Thought? No, says Mr. Brilliant: "It's the sort of thing that clever people say all the time."
William Safire, the author and columnist, questions whether a phrase maker should seek lucre along with credit. "Everybody who coins a short, pithy saying should be delighted to be quoted and not object to what lawyers call 'fair use,' " he says, "It seems to me that nobody should be able to copyright T-shirtisms like 'Because I'm the mommy, that's why.' "
Replies Mr. Brilliant: "My response would be that it's my total livelihood, and he has all his columns and books and miles and miles of prose." Mrs. Brilliant, who handles the couple's finances, says the business generates about $100,000 a year, with about half coming from the sale of the brightly colored postcards for 25 cents each. She says her husband's words now appear on about 100 million items.
Mr. Brilliant doesn't always charge for his work. Take the case of Joe A. Fear of Leadville, Colo., who asked for permission to carve Brilliant Thought No. 1041 on his wife's gravestone. Mr. Brilliant granted it without charge but with one condition: The words had to be accompanied by Mr. Brilliant's full name and copyright symbol. "These could be in quite small lettering and in an inconspicuous position," he wrote.
"I didn't mind at all," Mr. Fear says. And that's why there's a copyright symbol today on a headstone in the southeast corner of the Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Buena Vista, Colo. "Frances G. Fear," it reads. "Before I knew the best part of my life had come, it had gone."
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