Why Did No One Tell Me That Wittgenstein is Hilarious?

About a month ago, I read David Markson's haunting Wittgenstein's Mistress, which is the fictional first-person ramblings of a woman who is apparently the last living person on earth after some unnamed cataclysm. She travels the world, living inside famous museums such as the Louvre and the Prado, burning the frames for heat, while carefully nailing the original paintings back onto the wall. The book itself is written in the terse, austere style of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus--or at least so I'd been told, so I decided I should actually read the original Wittgenstein to see for myself.

I'd heard Wittgenstein quoted before, and it's easy to see why: Witty's terse style (that's what I'm gonna call him, cause he's so witty--see what I did there?) lends itself to easy one-liners, yielding such jems as "the world is the totality of facts, not things," "Philosophy is not a theory but an activity," and "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

But here's what I wasn't expecting about Witty: just how frickin' funny this guy can be! I'm willing to bet money this point is rarely if ever made. Take for example the following line, coming at the tale end of some relentlessly logical proposition: "But in fact all the propositions of logic say the same thing, to wit, nothing."

I near 'bout cracked up when I read that.

Then a couple pages later, I lost it again at: "And surely no one is going to believe that brackets have an independent meaning." I mean, brackets, really? This guy's hilarious, I'm not even being sarcastic!

I truly believe that all this is intentional humor, cause he finishes his own introduction with: "...the value of this work consists in that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved." That should've tipped us all off to his dry sense of humor.

Seriously, I might just buy Tractatus just to mark all the funniest lines.