The Art of the Insult – Part II

Selected by Bob Buddemeier

Herewith some more squeezings of bile from the compendiums of John Winokur, “The Portable Curmudgeon” and “The Portable Curmudgeon Redux.”

As we slide kicking and screaming toward our quadrennial Silly Season, may you enjoy these offerings with the child-like faith that they are all directed toward the other side of your personal aisle.

Politics and politicians

A triumph of the embalmer’s art.  Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan

She is democratic enough to talk down to anyone.  Austin Mitchell on Margaret Thatcher.

George Bush is Gerald Ford without the pizazz.  Pat Paulsen

People, singular and plural

People demand freedom of speech as compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.   Kierkegaard

His words leap across rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.  E. B. White

It’s not the frivolity of women that makes them so intolerable.  It’s their ghastly enthusiasm.  Horace Rumpole (John Mortimer)

A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.   Elbert Hubbard

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of his reason.   Orson Welles

Places and their populations

New York: Where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.  Harry Hershfeld    

Los Angeles:  Nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.   H.L. Mencken

You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well.  Carrie Fisher

National Characteristics and Cultures

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.  Gamal Abdel Nasser

Canada is a country so square that even the female impersonators are women.  Richard Benner

The Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth.  Daniel O’Connell.

The arts and entertainment

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.   Oscar Wilde

I do not think this poem will reach its destination.  Voltaire, on Rousseau’s “Ode to Posterity”

This film is the Platonic ideal of boredom, roughly equivalent to reading a three-volume novel in a language of which one knows only the alphabet.  John Simon on “Camelot”

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn’t amount to much.  Peter Ustinov on Hedda Hopper

Parsifal – the kind of opera that starts at six o’clock, and when it has been going on for three hours you look at your watch and it says 6:20.   David Randolph