Ashleigh Brilliant speaks at the 1984 Santa Barbara Writers Conference

Ashleigh Brilliant is an author and syndicated cartoonist born in London, UK, and living in Santa Barbara, California. 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 became a naturalized American citizen in 1969.

During the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco in 1967, Brilliant gave daily lectures near the Haight Street entrance of Golden Gate Park. He released a live album recorded in Golden Gate Park in 1967 on a small Hollywood, California record label, Dorash Enterprises. The album, Ashleigh Brilliant in the Haight-Ashbury, is rare and the material uses familiar public domain tunes and melodies and incorporates clever poetic lyrics about marijuana, the Diggers, San Francisco neighborhoods, and his personal experiences, all the while displaying a banter which ebbs and flows with his audience, who respond warmly to the performance and also participate in the songs. He states in the recording that he had been performing in this setting for approximately two hours each day the prior four weeks. He laughs throughout his performance, while the audience joins him in singing along and banging on percussive items. The album ends with a "Haight-Ashbury Farewell".

The Wall Street Journal described him in a 1992 profile as "history's only full time, professional published epigrammatist."