Pithy Postcards : Ashleigh Brilliant has created a lucrative business selling his little bits of wisdom.

I’m writing to tell you I have nothing to say .

--Pot-Shot Card No. 64, Ashleigh Brilliant

His favorite punctuation mark is the copyright symbol. And odds are he will always have plenty to say--in 17 words or less.

The ubiquitous pithy prose of epigrammatist Ashleigh Brilliant--a London-born, 58-year-old former college history professor and one-time Haight-Ashbury hippie--has appeared on more than 100 million artifacts of modern culture ranging from greeting cards to tote bags.

On Friday and Saturday, Brilliant will lend his talents to the fifth annual “Dave & Bob Talent Show” sponsored by KVEN-AM (1450) radio, to raise funds for the Special Olympics.

All of his 5,632 copyrighted Brilliant Thoughts began as brightly colored postcards called Pot-Shots, which he sells for two bits a piece. Consider number 142: “When all else fails, EAT!” Or the popular No. 433: “I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.”

“I call my Pot-Shots philosophical pornography because they strip the soul instead of the body. They are outrageousness disguised as wit,” Brilliant said.

They are also very lucrative.

According to Dorothy, Brilliant’s wife of 23 years, the business generates around $100,000 a year with about half coming from the sale of postcards.

Brilliant’s inspiration, he said, was his mother. “She got me to make greeting cards for my family during my early teens,” he said. “But my wife would say it’s only because we’re all so cheap,” he quipped.

Brilliant decided to epigrammatize his world view in 17 words or less after noticing that no Pot-Shot exceeded 16 words. He added a word in deference to the 17-syllable Japanese haiku.

He takes umbrage at comparisons to earlier epigrammatists Francois de la Rochefoucauld and Oscar Wilde, or creators of witty asides such as Will Rogers and Mark Twain. “They were not full time,” sniffed Brilliant, adding, “my rules automatically put me in a class by myself.”

He purposefully avoids rhyme for its own sake and references to fads or fashions. “The Pot-Shots should be universal and perpetual, and easy to translate to other languages,” Brilliant said.

Nevertheless, many evoke the epistemological Angst of the 1960s, as illustrated by No. 292, “The mind is a wonderful thing--everybody should have one,” or Brilliant’s personal favorite, No. 937: “Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything.”

Since the couple moved to Santa Barbara in 1973, Brilliant’s office has been housed in a cozy Cape Cod cottage. During my visit last week, Dorothy produced tea and lemon cookies from an attached kitchen while Sue McMillan, the company’s only employee, filled mail-order requests as she has done for the past 11 years.

Since 1967, Brilliant has also penned 10 books, including “The Haight-Ashbury Songbook” and “The Great Car Craze: How Southern California Collided With the Automobile in the 1920s” based upon his doctoral dissertation in American social history at UC Berkeley.

There are also seven collections of Brilliant Thoughts with such titles as, “We’ve Been Through So Much Together, and Most of It Was Your Fault.” And a book of essays will be released later this month by his Santa Barbara-based publisher, Woodbridge Press. His syndicated “Pot-Shots” panel appears nationally in about a dozen newspapers.

Brilliant started marketing his words in 1967 soon after arriving in San Francisco. “I started doing postcards, put them in stores along Haight Street, and people would buy them,” he said. “But the crucial factor was to copyright them.”

Brilliant has enforced his copyrights since 1979 after winning $18,000 in damages against a decal company that used three of his epigrams. He has also written more than 350 threatening letters and has won the six infringement cases he has filed.

Nevertheless, Brilliant--his real name--occasionally grants permission to use his words without payment. “There’s a U. S. district judge in Wisconsin who illustrates his decisions with a credited Pot-Shot about once a year,” Brilliant said.

And he allowed Joe A. Fear to use Brilliant Thought No. 1041 on his wife’s headstone in Buena Vista, Colo.,--provided it bear a copyright symbol and Brilliant’s full name in small letters. So Frances G. Fear will spend eternity with, “Before I knew the best part of my life had come, it had gone.”

Those who show up for the talent show this weekend will be subjected to just five minutes of Brilliant’s brand of humor. Dave Ciniero, co-host of KVEN’s popular “Dave & Bob” morning show, recalled Brilliant’s five-minute debut last year.

“Ashleigh cannot sing worth a damn,” Ciniero said. “But he came out looking like a religious leader from Harvard . . . and within two minutes he had the audience stomping, cheering and hand clapping. He even got a standing ovation. And people actually came back the next night to see him do it again.”

Brilliant demonstrated his skills at musical parody for this reporter by singing the rhymed lyrics of his “History Song” to John Philip Sousa’s rousing march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Move over, Weird Al Yankovic. Brilliant has created lyrics for more music that he calls “unsingable.” One of them is, “The Cat Song”--which he forbade me to print since the lyrics will be for sale at the performance.

The words may have been inspired by an episode spent feeding the cats in his wife’s absence, but Brilliant’s reaction to borrowing his verbiage is the same whether it’s on a coffee mug or in my column.

“If it’s officially licensed, I feel fine,” he said. “But if it’s a knockoff, I’d have to call my lawyers.”