great zings throughout history

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

whereas if it were Morrissey I would dig it.

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

Agree that brevity is the trickiest part--most one-liners come off as smarmy, or clumsily sarcastic, or obvious, and aren't funny at all. That's why I gravitate to things like Kael's "Circles and Squares," which is more like careful dismantling than zinging. But if you can get it right--Capote's line on Kerouac is the greatest example for me--perfection.

I like Capote's line but have never been totally sure what it means

See, I get Capote's thing, but I think he's totally wrong, and in fact it reflects more on him than on Kerouac, and therefore the zing kind of falls flat to me. The idea that 'it just isn't art' smacks of snobbery and narrow-mindedness, not things that I really want from my artists.

"hey how about instead you eat my ass you clueless cum bubble"

- churchill

not certain why 'typing' wouldn't be 'art' - though I guess the line is tending that way, somehow

I'm sure Kerouac is art, but I'm not always sure it's very good art

Well, that's fair enough - I've only read On the Road and one other that I can't remember the name of now, so I'd not make a very good defence for Kerouac. It's more the principle of the attack I dislike - that there somehow has to be a distancing between creator and work, that there must be some objective artistic principle adhered to, and worst of all to me, I feel there is an implication that phenomenological accounts are artistically void.

Kerouac influenced me when I read On the Road in university, but it was the kind of influence that was short-lived--doubt I could get through very much of the novel today. Conceding that there's some snobbery at work there--the Beats were new, Capote had been around for a few years--the meaning of his line seems as clear as could be to me: this guy's just banging it out, and he badly needs an editor. I probably first came across the line when I was discovering Kerouac, and I even found it funny then.

DEBUTANTE: I've made a bet with a friend that I can get you to say three words to me.

CALVIN COOLIDGE: Fuck you, cunt.

--- that there somehow has to be a distancing between creator and work, that there must be some objective artistic principle adhered to, and worst of all to me, I feel there is an implication that phenomenological accounts are artistically void.

I don't think I can see these things in Capote's line.
If anything the 'banging it out' sounds more like what he was saying. But then, I am not quite sure what he was saying.

I once wanted to reuse this line, in a different context, namely re the late alcoholic BRENDAN BEHAN -- cos he didn't write the work, just dictated it and someone else typed it. I think I was going to say that in print until PJ MILLER told me not to cos it was not nice to alcoholics.

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

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, April 29, 2012 9:49 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/44/We_Hate_It_When_Our_Friends_Become_Successful.gif/220px-We_Hate_It_When_Our_Friends_Become_Successful.gif

"hey how about instead you eat my ass you clueless cum bubble"

- churchill

― J0rdan S., Sunday, April 29, 2012 11:05 AM

needs context - the reply to his wife asking him to pass the salt

auto-zing:

Bob Monkhouse: "When I said I was going to become a comedian, they all laughed. Well, they're not laughing now."

lot of amazing zing scholarship itt... not

That one hurts.

PWN

One last (promise) thought on the Capote line: it's funnier when you hear it in his voice.

having made it to page 2 of On the Road, I'm with him.

From a letter from Groucho Marx to S. J. Perelman: "From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

literary zings are usually a lil too on the nose almost as if some lonely person fuming w/professional jealousy puzzled over them in a room until they got it just right

paraphrasing wilde ^

i have nothing to declare but my klout score

in one of the late marx bros. movie there's a bit where chico is taking a photo and says to groucho 'just look at me and pretend to laugh'

'i've been doing that for thirty years'

which i presume was scripted but i like to believe it wasn't, you know.

-

re: capote: the immediate context is kerouac's claim/lie that he wrote he wrote OTR in one three-day binge, i believe

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

Yeah Capote was basically saying, possibly inaccurately, that Kerouac just shat it out without putting much thought or craft into it.

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."