While they never had witless A&R men on their backs, they also never had the blanket advertising and radio pluggers that major labels bring.
If they had beaten Samoa, or at least not looked like such witless roadkill, Robbie Deans' men could have been forgiven a poor Tri-Nations campaign.
"The Real Story of Ah-Q" – Lu Xun's best-known fictional creation of the idiotic Chinese everyman – follows with sardonic delight the stupidities and indignities of this mock-biography's subject, a man too witless even to realise he is going to his own execution.
It is the five jobless, witless and inarticulate white men whose careless bigotry, whether they killed Stephen Lawrence or not, is truly terrifying.
No wonder women, and increasingly men, frightened witless at the prospect of losing the clout which having visibly appealing looks brings, are heading for nips, tucks, lifts, botox and more.
In the diaries, Tynan's misogyny, sadism and horny preoccupations warp his sensibility and render him witless in a way only a clever man who fancies himself a studied charmer can be.
He didn't have enough food for eight men, and he was scared witless, because if the Germans came they would waste no time in searching every house, including the rectory.
The New York Times' Stephen Holden calls the film "a vile, witless sex comedy set" and says of its leading man, "Mr. Efron's blank, weightless performance indicates that he hasn't graduated beyond the fluff of 'High School Musical.'" Gormican, meanwhile, "desperately tries to outdo forerunners like the 'Hangover' movies in gross-out humor.
Her middling white wine complaints, her witless shenanigans, her clear feelings for Doug, the paunchy man-mountain who is only polite to women he wants to fuck.
Whether they are as smart as "Coupling" or as witless as HBO's now dead "Mind of the Married Man," all sex comedies succeed or fail on the same question: How well do they get us to sympathize with Big Babies?
Yet he is often a witless windbag, and William Shakespeare, his creator and the wittiest of men, is not known for brevity; Hamlet uncut takes more than four hours.
