“Hey, Lar,” one might ask . . . “weren’t there a lot of insults in the first book?”1
Yes, there were a few. Placed strategically at the bottom of each page was a CNN-like running ticker tape of snarky insults, geared toward the mid-level intellect for quick and easy use. What about it?
What I intend to tell you with this second, clearly exploitative book is that the insult can be, and is, so much, much more.
It can be your friend, your protector, your sword, your shield . . . all that and a bag of chips.
Whence It Came
So, when did Man start insulting each other? Probably that day that Gork brought back a brontosaurus steak that was just a little too skimpy for the rest of the tribe’s taste . . . “Hey, we gonna eat that or make it into a wallet?” . . . then again, probably not.
I think it was Freud who said, “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization” . . . whatever.
Going back many years, one can find the insult starting to find its niche as early as the mid-1500s, with words like “ninny,” “dunderhead,” “simpleton,” “numbskull,” “nincompoop,” and “blockhead” showing up in literature and in the records of daily use. Used liberally by Shakespeare on down, the insult was primarily a phrase used to speak to one’s lack of intellect or knowledge . . .
Hey, who knew the Three Stooges were literary scholars?
Over the years, the insult began to evolve. Used to great effect in vaudeville and in the first talkies, the insult started to take hold as a way of putting your enemies off their game and bringing the audience into the joke, usually against the hapless recipient of the stinging barb. Cream pies in the face, while certainly insulting, just weren’t enough. People wanted words. And words they got.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and call Groucho Marx the first reigning king of the sarcastic insult. For those of you who are growing up on Jon Stewart, Groucho was Stewart times ten. He had a scathing wit, rapid-fire delivery, and a liberal way with innuendo.
Bringing It Home
We start young: hanging out and constantly making fun of our friends—their clothes, looks, music, girlfriends, other friends. Call it “dissing” or “playing the dozens.” Whatever you call it, it doesn’t make it any less nasty. You’re out to draw blood, symbolically, to prove your superiority. What makes it snarky is that element of the in-joke. If your friends didn’t get it—like the people who aren’t your friends who might well be listening—it wouldn’t be quite so fun.
As we got older and began to censor ourselves (or be censored by the surrounding conventions—work, home, school), we began to use sarcasm and innuendo.... always a treat but perhaps a bit more subtle than what you’re going to find here.2
The snarky insult, however, lets you get it all off your chest. It gives you the upper hand . . . and lets you keep it. It keeps the wolf from the door. It avoids beating around the bush. It cuts to the chase.3 It says, “You’re not getting away with that”. . . or “are you really going to do/say that?” or “don’t you realize what a schmuck you are?”
How to Do It
So where do we start? Maybe with a few basic rules . . .
Everything takes a backseat to wit and cleverness. You want to make people think . . . and then think twice.
Start by listening. Pay close attention to people. Besides alerting you to when you’re being insulted, it’s also a good way to find the fodder for the barbs you want to throw back.
Respond immediately. The moment comes and the moment passes. Jump in. In this book are tons of insults. Memorize as many as you can and use them to full effect.
The Insult Hall of Shame
As mentioned above, there were many players over the years but a select few achieved the kind of status that is only awarded to the most vitriolic of the bunch. In the late nineteenth century, with the advent of vaudeville, and years later, Vegas, the insult became a great source of comedy. The best and the brightest:4
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900): A serpent-tongued Irish writer who eventually became heralded as one of the greatest playwrights the world has known. Ridiculed in his day, he died broke at age forty-six.
Winston Churchill (1874–1965): The great statesman of the putdown. A speech impediment at a young age made him crotchety.
Groucho Marx5 (1890–1970): Rapid-fire insults before TiVo, so you needed to listen carefully. The undisputed master of the snark.
Mae West (1893–1980): Queen of the throwaway barb. A buxom, zaftig movie star with an inferred sex life that was turned up to eleven.
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967): A lifelong member of the Algonquin Round Table, Ms. Parker had an acerbic speedof-light wit that was often turned on anyone around her.
The Three Stooges: Moe (1897–1975), Larry (1902–1975), and Curly (1903–1952): (I don’t count Curly Joe or Joe Besser—Shemp is on the bubble). Mostly physical insults but lots of name-calling, too. Pick two fingers.
Don Rickles (1926–present): The undisputed master of the insult.6 Unlike many insult comics, who only find shortlived success, Rickles has enjoyed a sustained career in insult performance. Rickles was king of the quick comeback and the vitriolic putdown.
The Friars Roast (1950–present): Legitimizing the caustic putdown, all in “good fun.” Most recently a staple of Comedy Central, where the gloves have clearly been taken off and anything goes. Breeding ground for the great, the near-great, and the grating.
Dennis Miller (1953–present): Cerebral comic whose subtle references could make your head spin.
Denis Leary (1957–present): Started out as a Boston comic then turned a bigger public on to ranting on MTV and then took off.
Andrew Dice Clay (1957–present): The insult comic as rock star . . . appealed to the lowest common denominator, but, man, he could be funny.
Bill Hicks (1961–1994): His jokes included general discussions about society, religion, politics, philosophy, and personal issues. Hicks’s material was often deliberately controversial and quite insulting.
Lisa Lampanelli (1961–present): The latest in a long line of insult comics. Sold-out concerts make her the new Dice Clay.
Jeffrey Ross (1965–present): The Friars Club’s honorary “Roastmaster” and clearly a student of the “old school” of insult comedy.
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (1997–present): The brainchild of Robert Smigel of Saturday Night Live fame, this puppet dog started on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and soon took off with his own DVDs and appearances.
This is the bar, set high. Go ahead, Snarky. See if you can clear it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
SO, EVIDENTLY, I’VE BECOME a minor celebrity since the first book pubbed. And I am talkin’ minor . . . that kid that got rescued out of the well a few years back gets more attention these days than I do.... I know, deal with it, ya whiny snark baby.
Anyway ... I started a daily snark on Facebook (The Snark Handbook) where I make snarky comments about what’s happening in the news that makes me cranky.
I’ve included a few in the book, the timeless ones that will make sense, long after the celebrities that pass for news stories these days are in the retired B-list entertainers’ home. Called Snarkin’ the News, you too can play along, either on FB or by starting your own. It’s fun, it’s enlightening (gotta read the papers, Bernstein), and it’s just pennies a day (not really, it’s free) . . .
Enjoy. Or don’t.
Literature
Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
—JONATHAN SWIFT
THE LITERATI TEND TO be more cultured . . . but not a whole lot more. More often than not, they say in a multitude of sentences what should be said to better effect in one or two. Most expel more wind than a hot-air balloon.
The quotes here are where the so-called “best and brightest” hold forth and let the vitriol fly. Clearly, book learning doesn’t mean a better class of people. Some of these are downright evil. Can’t wait, huh? Good s
tuff... and all very usable in day-to-day verbal combat.
Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
—A. E. HOUSMAN
Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is only stupid.
—HEINRICH HEINE
She and her sex had better mind the kitchen and her children; and perhaps the poor; except in such things as little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that which men do worse or not at all.
—EDWARD FITZGERALD ON ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
—NORMAN MAILER
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.
—FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.7
—KURT VONNEGUT
Edna Ferber, one of the brightest lights in the New York “Algonquin Round Table Group” of the twenties and thirties, had a penchant for wearing elegantly tailored suits, trousers and all. Noël Coward met her one day in New York when he was wearing a suit very similar to the one Miss Ferber was sporting. “Edna, you look almost like a man,” he told her. “So do you,” she answered.
He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
—HENRY JAMES
You’re a mouse studying to be a rat.
—WILSON MIZNER
Match the Criticism to the Book8
Paradise Lost (John Milton)
Three Lives (Gertrude Stein)
Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
Franny and Zooey (J. D. Salinger)
A Man in Full (Tom Wolfe)
Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste . . . Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!—D. H. Lawrence
A cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.—Wyndham Lewis
The book has gas and runs out of gas, fills up again, goes dry. It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is fifteen hundred pages long....—Norman Mailer
One of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.—Samuel Johnson
So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.—Abraham Lincoln
It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it’s so narcissistic . . . so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can’t stand it.—Mary McCarthy
Mr. Huxley is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one.
—T. S. ELIOT ON ALDOUS HUXLEY
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
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
A flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting buns—especially when the ladies were present.
—WYNDHAM LEWIS ON FORD MADOX FORD
A book by Henry James is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a bit of string.
—H. G. WELLS
Dorothy Parker
That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say no in any of them.
She looks like something that would eat its young. (ON DAME EDITH EVANS)
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
A louse in the locks of literature.
—LORD ALFRED TENNYSON ON CRITIC CHURTON COLLINS
He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the U.S.
—GORE VIDAL ON ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
He missed an invaluable opportunity to hold his tongue.
—ANDREW LANG
He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.
—SAMUEL BUTLER
He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.
—CHARLES KINGSLEY
While he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter either.
—JAMES THURBER
He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
Insults and More Insults
He walked as if he had fouled his small clothes and looks as if he smelt it.9
Mr. Eliot is at times an excellent poet and has arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.10
He was humane but not human.11
He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.12
I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelveyear-old girls.13
Gibbon’s style is detestable; but it is not the worst thing about him.14
An unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.15
In conversation he is even duller than in writing, if that is possible.16
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
—H. H. MUNRO
Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
—ALAN BENNETT
Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.
—TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT
Some folks seem to have descended from the chimpanzee later than others.
—KIN HUBBARD
That’s not writing; that’s typing.17
—TRUMAN CAPOTE ON JACK KEROUAC
Clark Gable to William Faulkner: “Oh, Mr. Faulkner, do you write?” William Faulkner to Clark Gable: “Yes, I do, Mr. Gable. What do you do?”
His mind is so open that the wind whistles through it.
—HEYWOOD BROUN
He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.
—MARGARET HALSEY
I’ve just learned about his illness.
Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.
—IRVIN S. COBB
He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.
—SYDNEY SMITH
He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trilogy.
—MARK TWAIN
His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
—EDMUND WILSON ON EVELYN WAUGH
His features resembled a fossilized washrag.
—ALAN BRIEN
His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there’s scarcely a hole in it anywhere.
—MARK TWAIN
She’s the triumph of sugar over diabetes.
—GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
Snarkin’ the News
HarperCollins is paying Scott Brown a lot of money to bare all in his memoirs. What happened to the days when you actually had to do something first to get a book deal? He’ll have to wait and read his own book to find out what it is he’s actually done.
Other news: A judge ordered a Web site to remove a ficti
onal story about a berserk giraffe that attacked a guide at a local zoo ... perhaps because it was too hard to swallow?
The Snark Handbook: Insult Edition (Snark Series) Page 2