Ashleigh Brilliant – RIP
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Author, cartoonist, and “professional epigrammatist” Ashleigh Brilliant has passed away.
Ashleigh Elwood (Ash) Brilliant
December 9, 1933 – September 24, 2025
From the Santa Barbara Independent:
Ashleigh Brilliant, Santa Barbara’s best-known practicing epigrammatist — not to mention newspaper columnist, community activist, perambulator, and all-around eccentric — died September 24 at the age of 91. According to his obituary, Brilliant died a “quick, efficient death” and “completely on his own terms.”
In person, the British-born Brilliant was both whimsical and prickly, publishing his “Brilliant Thoughts” epigrams in various publications and on his illustrated “Pot-Shots” postcards, which he sold in shops and bookstores.
“My life has a superb cast, but I can’t figure out the plot,” he wrote in one. “Incredible as it seems, my life is based on a true story,” he wrote in another, in what could pass as his own obituary.
From Stacey Wright at Noozhawk:
On Sept. 24, 2025, the world lost a wildly unique and wonderful human being, Ashleigh Brilliant.
After a brief stint teaching at Hollywood High School, Ash relocated to San Jose, California, for college, then went on to UC Berkeley to earn a Ph.D in American history.
Following graduation from UC Berkeley, he landed a teaching position aboard the “floating in university,” teaching history and geography while sailing twice around the world. The year was 1965.
He was a self-described hippie, frequenting Haight-Ashbury and participating in the San Francisco counterculture scene. It was also during this phase of Ashleigh’s life that he began publishing his “Brilliant Thoughts” as postcards, wrote and recorded songs and generally exploded onto the creative scene with wit, wisdom and irreverence.
Ashleigh was one of a kind. A long-time member of Mensa, a dedicated scholar and lifelong learner, there wasn’t a moment in any day when his mind or body were idle. Most of Ash’s hours were spent researching any topic one could think of.
His many file cabinets attest to this, with hundreds of manila file folders stuffed with information, facts, and articles on everything from aardvarks to zucchini.
Ash was a well-known local author, epigramologist and the creator of Pot Shots, postcards with witty and amusing sayings. All epigrams penned and published by Ashleigh were required to conform to rigid rules including:
They must be no longer than 17 words (the same length as Japanese haiku); there must be no blatant reference to current political events, fashion or fads; there must be no rhyming or use of puns; the sentiment must be perpetual, universal and easily translatable; and the maximum number of Pot Shots was capped at 10,000 (which he hit years ago).
The Pot Shot cards beginning in 1967 became very popular. Brilliant’s local Carpinteria Herald, which first printed the cards, started running the cards as a newspaper panel on July 20, 1972. On February 17, 1975 the Pot-Shots panel began national distribution by the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. The local Santa Barbara News-Press ran it from the very beginning. (The weekly suburban Carpinteria Herald continued running their panel taken from the Pot Shot cards, not the CT-NYN panels.) Pot-Shots was carried by the syndicate until October 13, 1984, then followed by self-syndication. The Santa Barbara News Press ran the panel until at least September 20, 2020, by which time “Classic” was being inserted into the panels. In 1980 Ashleigh mostly eschews original cartoon art for public domain clip art.
The author of many books, Ashleigh was also a long-time columnist for the Montecito Journal, writing a weekly column called “Brilliant Thoughts.” The column was submitted every Thursday morning directly after Ash had read the previous week’s column in the paper.
As with his epigrams, his articles conformed strictly to a self-imposed set of rules: nothing political, nothing faddish, nothing specifically related to current events, no commercial interest or intent, no repeat information or topic, and the article had to be exactly 750 words in length.
The essays were written months before publication, to keep them from being topical.
The weekly “Brilliant Thoughts” column ran from November 9, 2017 to the present (the latest one dated September 30, 2025) in The Monecito Journal. They have archived the columns.
Much more Ashleigh Brilliant at his homepage. At his Facebook page. More Pot-Shots at GoComics.
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