INSULTS AND COMEBACKS

CLASSIC INSULTS

From the world's greatest minds - and some idiots

 

 

G

uys like to give other guys crap.  We enjoy it.  We like the back and forth; the insults and the comebacks.  I don’t know why.  It’s just the way it is.  I’m sure some high-falutin’ psychologist has done some study whereby they’ve determined that males verbally joust with each other in an effort to display their worth to the herd.  Sure, sometimes this process can escalate into violence when one of the parties is unable to control their emotions, after an inability to adequately one-up the aggressive insulter with an appropriate comeback.  But more often, males will gain a certain respect for each other via the insult and comeback process.

 

Some might think that this is a relatively new phenomenon, but actually it’s been gong on since the beginning of time.  Churchill did it, Mark Twain did it, heck, even Aristotle did it.  Here are some of the more famous insults and comebacks for your pleasure.  Feel free to use them at work, your next poker party, or the bar.

 

• He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. -- Winston Churchill
• He has every attribute of a dog except loyalty. -- Thomas P. Gore
• He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends. -- Oscar Wilde
• He has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair. -- Theodore Roosevelt
• He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul. -- David Lloyd George
• He has the attention span of a lightning bolt. -- Robert Redford
• He has Van Gogh's ear for music. -- Billy Wilder
• He hasn't an enemy in the world - but all his friends hate him. -- Eddie Cantor

 

 

 

 

• He is a fine friend. He stabs you in the front. -- Leonard Louis Levinson
• He missed an invaluable opportunity to hold his tongue. -- Andrew Lang
• He is a self-made man who worships his creator. -- John Bright
• He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright. -- Samuel Butler
• He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea and that was wrong. -- Benjamin Disraeli
• He was happily married - but his wife wasn't. -- Victor Borge
• He was humane but not human. -- e e Cummings (about Ezra Pound)
• He was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met. -- William Faulkner
• He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them. -- Charles Kingsley
• He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes. -- Fred Allen
• He was trying to save both his faces. -- John Gunther
• He writes his plays for the ages--the ages between five and twelve. -- George Nathan (about George Bernard Shaw)
• He'd make a lovely corpse. -- Charles Dickens
• He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices. -- Gore Vidal (about Truman Capote)

 

 

 

• His ears made him look like a taxicab with both doors open. -- Howard Hughes ( about Clark Gable)
• His face was filled with broken commandments. -- John Masefield
• His features resembled a fossilized wash rag. -- Alan Brien
• His golf bag does not contain a full set of irons. -- Robin Williams
• His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere. -- Mark Twain
• His mind is so open that the wind whistles through it. -- Heywood Braun
• His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap. -- Irving Stone (about William Jennings Bryan)
• His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork. -- Mae West
• I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse. -- Woody Allen
• I'll bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork. -- Groucho Marx
• I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
• I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial. -- Irvin S. Cobb
• I can't believe that out of 100,000 sperm, you were the quickest. -- Steven Pearl
• I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight. -- Mark Twain
• I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. -- Mark Twain
• I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here. -- Stephen Bishop
• I have more talent in my smallest fart than you have in your entire body. -- Walter Matthau
• I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. -- Clarence Darrow
• I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. -- Fred Allen
• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. -- Oscar Wilde
• Some folks are wise and some are otherwise. -- Tobias George Smolett
• Some folks seem to have descended from the chimpanzee later than others. -- Kin Hubbard
• Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. -- Joseph Heller "Catch-22"
• Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
• Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it. -- - Moses Hadas
• That's not writing, that's typing. -- Truman Capote

 

 

 

• The best part of you ran down your mother's legs. -- Jackie Gleason
• The gods too are fond of a joke. -- Aristotle
• The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind. -- Joseph Stilwell
• The tautness of his face sours ripe grapes. -- William Shakespeare
• The triumph of sugar over diabetes. -- George Jean Nathan
• He is an old bore. Even the grave yawns for him. -- Herbert Beerbohm Tree
• He is as good as his word - and his word is no good. -- Seamus MacManus
• He is brilliant - to the top of his boots. -- David Lloyd George
• He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others. -- Samuel Johnson
• He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death. -- H. H. Munro
• He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. -- Paul Keating
• He is so stupid you can't trust him with an idea. -- John Steinbeck
• He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease. -- Henry James
• He knows so little and knows it so fluently. -- Ellen Glasgow
• He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. -- Raymond Chandler
• He looked like a half-melted rubber bulldog. -- John Simon
• He looks as though he's been weaned on a pickle. -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about Calvin Coolidge)
• He loves nature in spite of what it did to him. -- Forrest Tucker
• He made enemies as naturally as soap makes suds. -- Percival Wilde
• He makes a very handsome corpse and becomes his coffin prodigiously. -- Oliver Goldsmith
• He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own. -- Margaret Halsey
• He never bore a grudge against anyone he wronged. -- Simone Signoret
• He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style. -- Leo Tolstoy
• He never said a foolish thing nor never did a wise one. -- Earl of Rochester
• He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop. -- Sydney Smith
• He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold. -- John Ruskin
• He used statistics the way a drunkard uses lampposts - for support, not illumination. -- Andrew Lang
• He was a bit like a corkscrew. Twisted, cold and sharp. -- Kate Cruise O'Brien
• He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trilogy. -- Mark Twain
• He was about as useful in a crisis as a sheep. -- Dorothy Eden
• He was as great as a man can be without morality. -- Alexis de Tocqueville
• I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception. -- Groucho Marx
• I regard you with an indifference bordering on aversion. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
• I want to reach your mind - where is it currently located? -- Ashleigh Brilliant
• I will always love the false image I had of you. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
• I wish I'd known you when you were alive. -- Leonard Louis Levinson
• I worship the quicksand he walks in. -- Art Buchwald
• If he were any dumber, he'd be a tree. -- Barry Goldwater
• Little things affect little minds. -- Benjamin Disraeli
• Nature not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write. -- A. E. Housman
• Never trust a man who combs his hair straight from his left armpit. -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about Douglas MacArthur)
• Next-day delivery in a nanosecond world. -- Van Jacobson
• No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have; and I think he's a dirty little beast. -- W. S. Gilbert
• Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is only stupid. -- Heinrich Heine
• There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure. -- Jack E. Leonard
• They don't hardly make 'em like him any more - but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway. -- Hunter S. Thompson
• Timid? As timid as a buzz saw. -- George Ells (about Hedda Hopper)
• Useless as a pulled tooth. -- Mary Roberts Rinehart
• We've been through so much together, and most of it was your fault. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
• What's on your mind? If you'll forgive the overstatement. -- Fred Allen
• What has a tiny brain, a big mouth, and an opinion nobody cares about? You! -- from Murphy Brown
• When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I feel sorry - for the clothes. -- Josh Billings
• When you go to the mind reader, do you get half price? -- David Letterman
• While he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter either. -- James Thurber
• If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic.
• Why are we honoring this man? Have we run out of human beings? -- Milton Berle
• Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum. -- P. G. Wodehouse
• Why don't you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out? -- Groucho Marx
• You're a good example of why some animals eat their young. -- Jim Samuels
• You're a mouse studying to be a rat. -- Wilson Mizner
• You're a parasite for sore eyes. -- Gregory Ratoff
• You couldn't tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation. -- Irvin S. Cobb
• You have a good and kind soul. It just doesn't match the rest of you. -- Norm Papernick
• You look into his eyes, and you get the feeling someone else is driving. -- David Letterman
• You really have to get to know him to dislike him. -- James T. Patterson (about Thomas Dewey)
• Fine words! I wonder where you stole them. -- Jonathan Swift

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