great zings throughout history

Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall down a hole and die - Woody Allen.

Prob my favourite ever quote.

Reporting I'm drunk is like saying there was a Tuesday last week.
- Grace Slick

good self-zing

Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside.
- Ludwig van Beethoven

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
- Mark Twain

Montagu: I don't know whether you'll die on the gallows or of the pox

Wilkes: That will depend on whether i embrace your principles or your mistress

yes

attributed to some french dude also iirc

now that is a zing

I'm going to just stipulate the collected zings of Dorothy Parker, but for example:

"If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised."

Capote on Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing."
Mickey Mantle on Jim Bouton and Ball Four: "Who?"

Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall down a hole and die - Woody Allen.

Prob my favourite ever quote.

Except you have both the quote and the credit wrong...

Those guys grew up in L.A. and they don't have cow-shit on their boots - they just got dog shit from Laurel Canyon. - Tom Waits

Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall down a hole and die - Woody Allen.

Prob my favourite ever quote.

Except you have both the quote and the credit wrong.

really? i think i first saw this quoted in another book, but definitely as i repeated it here. who was it really?

"This book fills a much-needed gap." - Moses Hadas

xp

there are a bunch of variations on that tragedy/comedy line, but they're all attributed to mel brooks

moses hadas quote is awesome

yeah i googled a bit, it was credited to woody allen when i first encountered it, really annoying to be wrong about it, great quote though.

classic Parker: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

Nancy Astor: "If you were my husband, I'd poison your tea."

Winston Churchill: "Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it."

PETER GRANT: "Hello, I'm Peter Grant. I manage Led Zeppelin."

BOB DYLAN: "Hey, I don't come to you with my problems, do I?"

The Parker isn't real, afaik

really?

JFK: "If this plane crashed, we'd probably all be killed, wouldn't we?"

MORT SAHL: "Yes, Mr. President."

JFK: "And it occurs to me that your name would be in very small print."

oh sick burn

"open manhole" is the usual version of the Brooks quote, specificity makes it funnier

there have been a few Snopes/Straight Dope/etc. forum investigations of the Parker quote and no one can ever find that she actually said it (usually attributed to a review of Atlas Shrugged or a Benito Mussolini novel, the latter is definitely untrue)

too long to be a zing, but Whittaker Chambers's Atlas Shrugged review is probably the best/most brutal literary takedown
"Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal….Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”"

lol that tom waits quote reminds me of casey kasem's 'these guys are from england and who gives a shit'

not quite zings, perhaps, but vladimir nabokov was the king of offhand dismissals:

Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.

George Bernard Shaw, NSFW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGKCLH05WAo

(note 'epigram' was early 90's speak for 'zing')

early 1990s?

Martin Luther then attacked Henry VIII in print, calling him a “pig, dolt, and liar”. [9]:227 At the request of Henry VIII, More set about composing a rebuttal: the resulting Responsio ad Lutherum was published at the end of 1523. In the Responsio, More defended the supremacy of the papacy, the sacraments, and other church traditions. More’s language, like Luther’s, was virulent, and he branded Luther an “ape”, a “drunkard”, and a “lousy little friar” amongst other insults. [9]:230 While writing under the pseudonym of Rosseus, More mirrors Luther's own unscholarly use of language. At one point More offers to:

"throw back into your paternity's shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up". [16]

awesome thread

(xpost) I can't find it, but I've got a book of interviews with Nabokov somewhere, and his putdowns of other writers are pretty great.

Ditto Kael's back-to-back takedowns of Siegfried Kracauer and (of course) Sarris in I Lost It at the Movies, although both pieces tend to methodically build arguments rather than zing.

(allegedly)

Somerset Maugham watching Spencer Tracy during filming of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: "Which one is he playing now?"

I'm with Nabokov on Pasternak and Faulkner, but Mann's asinine "Death in Venice"? ;_;

Also, I've read a bit of Nabokov's literary criticism now, and for someone who can reach the heights he can (for which read: OMG Pale Fire is amazing) he's pretty buttoned up and conservative in his thinking...

GB Shaw once wrote in a book review, "Once you put it down, you can't pick it up"

Ravel has refused the Legion d'honneur, but all his music accepts it

(satie)

I often laugh at well crafted (or just outrageously funny) putdowns independent of whether I agree with them or not. (Re Nabokov.)

Nabokov loved Cheever's "The Country Husband" so.

Gore Vee-dal: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."

William F. Buckley's famous rebuttal to John Lindsay during a '65 mayoral race sort of fits: "I am satisfied to sit back and contemplate my own former eloquence."

I often laugh at well crafted (or just outrageously funny) putdowns independent of whether I agree with them or not. (Re Nabokov.)

― clemenza, Sunday, April 29, 2012 1:30 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cf v much hitchens

Bide my shiny metal, ass -- Bender http://i.imgur.com/RlOaq.gif

in bender's ass, we abide

mart & hitch

The year was 1981. We were in a tiny Italian restaurant in west London, where we would soon be joined by our future first wives. Two elegant young men in waisted suits were unignorably and interminably fussing with the staff about rearranging the tables, to accommodate the large party they expected. It was an intensely class-conscious era (because the class system was dying); Christopher and I were candidly lower-middle bohemian, and the two young men were raffishly minor-gentry (they had the air of those who await, with epic stoicism, the deaths of elderly relatives). At length, one of them approached our table, and sank smoothly to his haunches, seeming to pout out through the fine strands of his fringe. The crouch, the fringe, the pout: these had clearly enjoyed many successes in the matter of bending others to his will. After a flirtatious pause he said, “You’re going to hate us for this.”

And Christopher said, “We hate you already.”

Nabokov's widely spread disdain can be amusing but I don't see put-downs from him in the fabulous way cited from Parker and others upthread -- the kind of compressed wit that shows you a little of the quality that human consciousness has added to the universe

(though I do remember VN saying something about Bellow that amused me, whatever it was.)

I can precisely imagine Hitchens saying that, but I don't feel any sympathy or solidarity with him saying it - cos it's him and the way he would say it

someone zing amon

unzingable

I will zing him

...

zinging mt. everest

It's always some zing.

hello anon

― The Startrekman, Sunday, April 29, 2012 4:19 PM (Yesterday)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRw97mX4EMg

AH SAY HEY MON

lol Startrekman

sick burn

lol that tom waits quote reminds me of casey kasem's 'these guys are from england and who gives a shit'

― balls, Sunday, 29 April 2012 04:59

p sure that was prof. wgw of this parish tho?

This thread will belong to Mitt Romney come Wednesday.

Symmetry required it: 2012 american general election thread #2

Noel Gallagher on Jack White
“He looks like Zorro on doughnuts.”

"As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man, I want you to know that."[21]

RIP big man

was Rummy ever this zingy?

no but he was a better epistemologist

zinging saddam just seems too easy

and i had the best present i was going to send you

http://www.ebay.ie/itm/G7199-Modern-Postcard-4x6-General-Norman-Schwarzkopf-/370526552767

tbf a few other dudes with those qualifications were more successful than norm

http://i.imgur.com/ldsUHVe.png

In 1958 Winston Churchill broke his spine in a fall and was required to sleep with a bedrest, which he hated. He and nurse Roy Howells got into a heated argument in which the two swore at one another.

In making up afterward, Churchill said, “You were very rude to me, you know.”

Howells said, “Yes, but you were rude too.”

Churchill said, “Yes, but I am a great man.”

“There was no answer to that,” Howells remembered later. “He knew, as I and the rest of the world knew, that he was right.”

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/03/22/detente/ (!)

Those guys grew up in L.A. and they don't have cow-shit on their boots - they just got dog shit from Laurel Canyon. - Tom Waits

accidental self zing imo

XP it doesn't really work so well as a zing if the person saying it seems like a d-bag who's hard to sympathize with

yeah remember all those country rock albums tom waits made

In 2004 former Scottish Orange Order member Adam Ingram sued MP George Galloway for saying in his autobiography that Ingram had "played the flute in a sectarian, anti-Catholic, Protestant-supremacist Orange Order band".

Judge Lord Kingarth ruled that the phrase was 'fair comment' on the Orange Order

Tho he did note, tbf, that there was no evidence of Ingram ever having played the flute.

The Queen’s army caught Oilill at Log na Fola, (the bloody hollow) leading to the following “rann”:

May you have wet arses
Munster scum, evil rogues,
Without benefit of sun,
Or bee or flower,
In a lonely hollow,
Without cerements in misery,
May the hordes of hell follow you
Round and round forever and forever

not so much a zing as a Bardic Hardmen entry?

they killed them immediately afterwards, idk where that leaves the balance tbh

agreed it deserves recognition, anyway

Would work fine and dandy as a "resignation from ILX speech"

Soon after it was published, statisticians from the American Statistical Association claimed "a random selection of three people would have been better than a group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey".

https://twitter.com/jchjackson/status/479312749105647616/photo/1

http://i.imgur.com/jY6ftne.jpg

of whom was it that gore vidal said: "a writer's writer, in much the same way a butler is sometimes called a gentleman's gentleman"? still laughing at that one tbh
― thomp, Sunday, April 29, 2012 1:09 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Off topic as so often, I can't resist mentioning that Gore Vidal described Nabokov (if I remember rightly) as being "a writer's writer in the same way that a butler is a gentleman's gentleman". Vidal was far better at these put-downs than as a critic or novelist.
― Martin Skidmore, Thursday, April 11, 2002 7:00 PM (fourteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was thinking about this quote today and i can't find any source for it outside of ilx. real or not??

the quote that's been attributed to John McKay of the Bucs (but might have been someone else)...

"What do you think of your team's execution, coach?"
'I'm in favor of it'.

xp variation of it appears in this amazon user review from 1999 (by "A Customer")

Richard Primus is a scholar's scholar. The description indicates not esotericism, as in "writer's writer," but exemplarity, as in "gentleman's gentleman."

https://www.amazon.co.uk/American-Language-Rights-Ideas-Context/dp/0521616212

also something here from 2000: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LZX7b_vh8_IC&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq=%22writer%27s+writer%22+%22gentleman%27s+gentleman%22&source=bl&ots=ooNqY_UxlQ&sig=7kqfi6LOLSIkLgFrVen5FpFQdgc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjMpJX84L3RAhVLuRQKHV33A38Q6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=%22writer's%20writer%22%20%22gentleman's%20gentleman%22&f=false In this

trump sorely missing from this thread

trump sorely missing from this thread

I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but his zinger response to Lindsay Graham the other day--"still waiting to get to 1% in the polls, Lindsay?"--was pretty devastating

Only human beings eligible for this thread.

Trump seems more of an insults guy than a zings guy

‘By God,’ said he, ‘to put it in a word,
Your shithouse rhyming isn’t worth a turd!
You’re wasting time, that’s what, and nothing else.
I tell you flat, sir, no more of your verse!’

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 1478

Vidal said that John Kerry looked like Lincoln... "after the assassination."