People
A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.
— Roger Ebert
Behind the line May contain spoilers.
Our reading
An editorial interpretation.
The passage compares people who take everything literally to someone encountering each tree without seeing the forest around it. Applied to wit, the analogy suggests repeated surprise without grasping how the joke works. The frustration concerns an inability to move beyond the immediate, literal reading.
Context reviewed