Ashleigh Brilliant

Ashleigh Brilliant

Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant (born 9 December 1933) is an author and syndicated cartoonist born in London, UK, and living in Santa Barbara, California, USA. He is best known for his Pot-Shots, single-panel illustrations with one-line humorous remarks, which began syndication in the United States of America in 1975. Brilliant achieved American citizenship in 1969.

Brilliant graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a Ph.D. in history in 1964 and taught on a "Floating University", an educational cruise ship that traveled around the world in the mid-60s. He later taught at a community college in Bend, Oregon.

During the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco in 1967, Brilliant gave daily lectures near the Haight Sttreet entrance of Golden Gate Park. He released a live album recorded in Golden Gate Park in 1967 on a small Hollywood, California record label, Dorash Enterprises (Dorash LP-1001). The album, Ashleigh Brilliant in the Haight-Ashbury, is quite rare today. The material uses familiar public domain songs and melodies and incorporates clever poetic lyrics about marijuana, the Diggers, San Francisco neighborhoods, and his personal experiences, all the while displaying a banter which ebbs and flows with his audience, who respond warmly to the performance and also participate in the songs. He states in the recording that he had been performing in this setting for approximately two hours each day the prior four weeks. He laughs throughout his performance, while the audience joins him in singing along and banging on percussive items. The album ends with a "Haight-Ashbury Farewell".

The Wall Street Journal described him in a 1992 profile as "history's only full time, professional published epigrammatist."

At one time, there was some confusion and controversy as to the ownership and recognition of his distinctiver art form. In a copyright infringement suit filed by Brilliant, a United States federal judge ruled that while short phrases are not eligible for copyright, Brilliant's works were epigrams and therefore copyrightable (Brilliant v. W.B. Productions Inc., 1979).

While Brilliant employs a self-imposed limit of 17 words per epigram, he has actually written and published 41 with 18 words and one with 19 words (By the miracle of teaching, I can give you some of my ability, without losing any of it myself.)

In 1999 he authored the "Y1K Crisis" article which parodies the "Y2K Crisis" of 1999.

Part of the counter-culture scene in San Francisco in the late 1960s, Brilliant wrote and sang a series of parody songs about the hippie movement in Golden Gate Park as the hippie movement happened. Called "The Haight-Ashbury Songbook, the songs now appear on a CD collection available on his website.

Brilliant is frequently asked about his real last name, of which he says:

As far as I know, the name Brilliant is of Russian/Polish/Jewish origin, and is akin to other Jewish names related to precious metals and jewels, e.g. Gold, Silver, Diamond, Ruby, Pearl. (One meaning of brilliant is a kind of diamond.) These in turn relate to the kinds of trades in which many European Jews were engaged when, in the time of Napoleon, they were first required to take surnames.