1693–1766 · English stage actor · the ancestral coldest-winter quip
James Quin was one of the leading actors of the London stage in the first half of the 18th century, famed for his declamatory style and his sharp wit off the boards. The germ of the “coldest winter” joke — his deadpan reply that the worst winter he could recall was “last summer” — was recorded by Horace Walpole in a 1789 letter. Over the next century the quip was retold about city after city; Mark Twain passed it along (about Paris, crediting Quin) in 1880, and only much later did an anonymous San Francisco version get falsely stamped with Twain’s name.