It's very long. Dip into it here and there.
Tongue Lashings
Ever thought about the perfect comeback . . . too late? Barney shares his favourite putdowns, insults and one-liners.
WILKES, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox,'' thundered the Earl of Sandwich. The 18th-century radical English MP's rejoinder was instant: ''That, my lord, depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.'' As a piece of repartee, that is hard to beat.
The biblical Book of Proverbs advocates ''the soft answer that turneth away wrath'', but a good insult is so much more satisfying and memorable. Though most insults we encounter day to day are mere vulgar abuse, sometimes they approach the pinnacle of human wit. An avid collector, I'm fond of them - perhaps too fond, as a sarcastic reply at an interview 25 years ago cost me a lucrative job - and have a cornucopia to share.
Few masters of wit were more scathing than Samuel Johnson. Asked to say which of two minor figures was the better poet, the literary titan replied: ''Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.''
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Then there is the rejection letter in which he demolished an aspiring author: ''Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.''
Of the revered John Milton, Johnson opined that ''Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.''
Insults have a fine and ancient pedigree. Though it advocates the aforementioned soft answer, the Bible, which is much more earthy than most people realise, is not always reticent. God himself, in the words of the prophet Ezekiel (6th century BC), likens the Samaritans to a prostitute who ''lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses'', while John the Baptist describes the Pharisees as a ''brood of vipers''.
We have vulgar graffiti from Rome and Pompeii, insults in Egyptian hieroglyphics. After all, as Sigmund Freud observed, the first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilisation.
So we can all enjoy the sort of devastating wit Bette Davis showed when she observed of a passing Hollywood starlet, ''there goes the good time that was had by all''.
As I noted from experience, the brilliant remark is often irresistible, however unwise. Sydney Smith, the 19th-century Anglican wit, accurately told his brother Bobus (advocate-general of Bengal, later an MP): ''You have risen by your gravity and I have fallen by my levity.''
It can't have helped Smith's ecclesiastical career when some of his witticisms got around: ''I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.'' Or: ''I must believe in the apostolic succession, there being no other way of tracing the Bishop of Exeter to Judas Iscariot.''
He said of a boring preacher: ''He evidently thought sin was to be taken from man as Eve was from Adam, by casting him into a deep sleep.''
Indeed, the insult surely traces its origin to Adam and Eve, who gave the first grounds for James Thurber's assertion that a woman's place is in the wrong. And gender has offered a rich vein of possibility, for both sexes.
Joseph Addison, who founded The Spectator in the 18th century, nicely voiced a common accusation: ''One of the fathers has defined a woman to be an animal that delights in finery. I have … observed, that in all ages they have been more careful than the men to adorn that part of the head which we generally call the outside.''
John Milton touched upon another common theme when asked during the 1600s whether he would allow his daughters to learn foreign languages. ''One tongue is enough for a woman,'' he replied.
American entertainer Jimmy Durante shared his sentiments 300 years later. ''My wife has a slight impediment in her speech,'' he said. ''Every now and then she stops to breathe.''
On the other side of the ledger, this anonymous poet had a point: ''Women have many faults, men have only two: / Everything they say and everything they do.''
''The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs,'' observed Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, the Marquise de Sevigne.
Max Beerbohm, the humorist, had an answer: ''You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.''
Oscar Wilde opined that bigamy is having one wife too many - monogamy is the same. Nancy Astor levelled the score in asserting, ''I married beneath me. All women do.''
Socrates had an appropriately philosophical approach: ''By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.''
Mark Twain landed a double blow with this favourite: ''Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement.'' Groucho Marx scored in similar vein: ''I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.''
One of the best uses of the insult is to depress pretension. Noted wit and British prime ministerial spouse Margot Asquith scored a notable victory against the silent film star Jean Harlow, who insisted on calling her MargoT, emphasising the T. Asquith told her sweetly, ''No dear, the T is silent, as in Harlow.''
But those who live by the sword die by the sword, and Asquith suffered in turn when Dorothy Parker reviewed one of her books in The New Yorker: ''The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.''
Dorothy Parker was truly formidable. A rival, Clare Booth Luce, met her at the swing door of a hotel and stepped back, saying superciliously ''age before beauty''. ''And pearls before swine,'' riposted Parker as she swept through. It was Parker who reviewed Katharine Hepburn in a Broadway show: ''She ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B.'' Another review, of a play called I Am a Camera, consisted of three words: ''Me no Leica.''
But, if memory serves me, Alexander Woollcott surpassed that with a one-word review of a play, Wham: ''Ouch!''
James I of England, of King James Bible fame, produced a decent line about poet John Donne: ''Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God, for they pass all understanding.''
Perhaps cruellest of all was a one-sentence review by Ambrose Bierce, author of the brilliant The Devil's Dictionary: ''The covers of this book are too far apart.''
But the critics have not had it all their own way. Consider this comeback, a note composer Max Reger wrote to Munich critic Rudolf Louis: ''I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. Very shortly it will be behind me.''
In fact music, which English poet William Congreve told us has charms to soothe a savage breast, can cause rather differing emotions. The Berlin Signale reviewed Wallingford Riegger's Dichotomy: ''It sounded as though a pack of rats were being slowly tortured to death, while from time to time a dying cow moaned.''
Beethoven once told a fellow composer: ''I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music.''
But few composers have so suffered (or so deserved to suffer) the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Richard Wagner. ''Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease?'' asked Nietzsche. Rossini said one couldn't judge Wagner's Lohengrin after a first hearing, ''and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time''.
And critic David Randolph said of Wagner's Parsifal, ''[it] is the kind of opera that starts at six o'clock, and after it has been going three hours you look at your watch and it says 6.20''.
Atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg has also copped his share of flak. One critic said his violin concerto was as comprehensible as a lecture on the fourth dimension delivered in Chinese, and another described his Chamber Symphony as a Chamber of Horrors Symphony. Yet another opined that Schoenberg ''mingles with his music sharp daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his victim's flesh''.
National stereotypes provide endless fun. Napoleon called the English a nation of shopkeepers, while 18th-century man of letters Horace Walpole was equally scathing: ''I do not dislike the French from the vulgar antipathy between neighbouring nations, but for their insolent and unfounded air of superiority.''
Scotland has suffered, not least at the hands of Samuel Johnson. Boswell, a Scot, was speaking of its noble prospects (views), and Johnson replied: ''The noblest prospect a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England.'' In another conversation, Johnson told his interlocutor Scotland was a vile country. ''Well sir, God made it,'' came the reply. Dr Johnson: ''Certainly he did, but we must remember that He made it for Scotchmen.''
Germans are forever the butt of unjust jokes about their lack of humour (what's not to love in someone slipping on a banana skin?). Another Johnson, contemporary essayist and historian Paul Johnson, wrote in The Spectator: ''Germans of course are funniest when unaware they are provoking mirth … Colonel-Count Von Rausching, the officer commanding the famous Prussian cavalry regiment, the Death's Head Hussars, became worried, about the year 1900, by the way his subalterns were laughing. He summoned a meeting in the mess and told them: 'There is a right and a wrong way to laugh. I do not want my young officers sniggering or tittering or yelping or guffawing, like tradesmen or Jews or Poles. There is only one admissible way for a military gentleman to laugh, and that is by a short, sharp ejaculation. Thus: Ha! Understand? Now, let us see if you can do it properly. Ready? One, two, three, Ha! One, two, three, Ha! Very gut! … So now you know how to laugh. Never let me hear any of you snigger again.' ''
If any area excels in the art of the insult it is politics, relying as it does on words and debate.
The exchanges of Winston Churchill are legendary. The best known is with Bessie Braddock who accused him of being drunk. ''Yes, and you … are ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober.'' Then there was Lady Astor: ''Winston, if you were my husband, I'd poison your coffee.'' Churchill: ''If you were my wife I'd drink it.''
And with George Bernard Shaw, who sent him two tickets to the opening night of Saint Joan with a note: ''One for yourself and one for a friend, if you have one.'' Churchill replied that he couldn't make it, but would like tickets for the second night, ''if there is one''.
Churchill said of Labour MP Stafford Cripps, ''There, but for the grace of God, goes God'', and called fellow politician Clement Attlee ''a sheep in sheep's clothing''. But he denied the line attributed to him, ''an empty taxi arrived at Number 10 Downing Street and Clement Attlee got out''.
Jeremy Thorpe took a biblical tone when Harold Macmillan sacked half his cabinet in 1962: ''Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.''
Mark Twain had a properly cynical view of Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia and the Rhodes scholarships: ''I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope as a keepsake.''
British Labour MP Denis Healey described being criticised by Margaret Thatcher's longest-serving cabinet minister Geoffrey Howe as like being savaged by a dead sheep. US president Lyndon Baines Johnson was a little earthier about future president Gerald Ford: ''So dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.''
Australian insults can be very funny, but they tend to be robust rather than subtle, as with former prime minister Paul Keating's famous ''unrepresentative swill'' of the Senate. But one immortal line, brutal and brilliant, was his memorable description of John Hewson: ''This little flower, this delicate little beauty, this cream puff … He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.''
To return to the inimitable John Wilkes - while campaigning at an election, he was told by a heckler, ''I would rather vote for the devil than for John Wilkes.'' He replied: ''And if your friend is not standing?''
At a society dinner, he gave short shrift to a conceited young oaf's ceaseless exposition of his own virtues. ''I was born between 12 and one on the first of January,'' confided the young man. ''Isn't it strange?'' ''Not in the slightest,'' answered Wilkes. ''You could only have been conceived on the first of April.''
Wilkes once proposed the king's health at a dinner attended by the Prince of Wales, his rival. The prince asked Wilkes how long he had been so concerned with the perpetuation of his father's life, to which the MP replied: ''Since I have had the honour of your royal highness' acquaintance.''
Which is about as subtle yet stinging as an insult can get.
