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Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant (born 9 December 1933 in London, UK) is an author and syndicated cartoonist 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 degree in history in 1964 and taught on a "Floating University" an educational cruise ship that travelled 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 he gave daily lectures near the Haight St. entrance of Golden Gate Park.

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 unique art form. In a copyright infringement suit filed by Brilliant, a United States federal judge has 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).

Brilliant employs a self-imposed limit of 17 words per epigram.

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 60s, 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 web site.

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.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ashleigh Brilliant", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0