Wicked Words Of Wisdom
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds!
That classic put-down was written by none other than Mark Twain.
However William Faulkner later said of Twain, “A hack writer who would have been considered fourth-rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
And about Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner said, “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Ernest said, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think that big emotions come from using big words?”
Picky, picky, boys, picky!
Just one more, not so much for its cleverness but for its nastiness. Bette Midler, who is hardly the epitome of feminine beauty and a girl I always thought could be part beaver and hence a serious danger to the forest industry, said of Princess Anne, “Such an active lass. So outdoorsy. She loves nature in spite of what it did to her.”
Bette, a woman who could eat an apple through a picket fence, had the audacity to poke fun at Princess Anne.
Isn’t it the dream of most people, to be born with the ability to come out with the wittiest of insults at precisely the right moment – especially if the insulted is standing right there in front of us looking stunned and without a comeback?
The trouble, of course, is we all have that ability but it is never right there on the tip of our tongue, it is flitting around somewhere in the empty corridors of our mind. Oh, we might come up with something, eventually, but if it does we will be alone and the one we wanted to insult had already come up with a zinger leaving you with nothing to say but “Oh yeah, well so is your old man.”
In trying to find examples of great insults I picked a favourite book off the shelf, Readers’ Digest’s Treasury of Wit and Wisdom. There are three hundred pages of witty, wise and sometimes deadly serious quotes from famous people in there, William Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Winston Churchill and of course, Wu Ting-Fang (who could possibly forget good old Wu? Such times we had together!), so many great people.
Let’s take a look at some really good quotes. This one is from Warren Buffett, one of the sharpest businessmen on the planet; “I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.” Can you imagine Trump saying that?
Steven Wright: “I bought some batteries but they weren’t included,” or another of his good ones, “What’s another word for thesaurus?”
Woody Allen, a strange man granted, but one of the greatest humorists alive is in the book no less than 21 times. I have to admit Woody is not everyone’s cup of tea, maybe just mine, you have to be half-baked to get his brand of humour and I am definitely that. I have two of his books that are so badly beaten up they are held together with elastic bands and masking tape. Trying to read them is like trying to decipher the message in a bowl of Campbell’s Vegetable soup.
“On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.”
“It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off.”
“If my films make one more person miserable I’ll feel I have done my job.”
“Remember, if you smoke after sex you are doing it too fast.”
One of the wittiest people I can remember is Oscar Levant. Do you remember Oscar from An American in Paris, Rhapsody in Blue and a dozen other movies? He was a brilliant concert pianist, or as he liked to say, “a concert pianist, the pretentious way of saying I am unemployed at the moment.” What I didn’t know about him, among a host of other things, is he wrote the musical score for twenty movies and is on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Most of all I liked him for his vicious wit and sarcasm:
“I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
“Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.”
‘There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
“I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.”
I wonder what Oscar would say about the current American Administration.
(Image Supplied)
