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Quick-Fire Insults
Leaving the Cafe Royal one evening, Frank Harris passed a table where Oscar Wilde's notorious friend. Lord Alfred Douglas, was dining. Seeing Harris, his lordship shouted after him:
'There goes Ancient Pistol.'
'Well roared. Bottom,' Harris shouted back.
'When may I offer you a slice of this most excellent ham?' Cardinal Vaughan asked the Chief Rabbi. 'At your Eminence's wedding,' he replied.
'I believe that I could write like Shakespeare, if I had a mind to try it,' William Worsdworth confided to Charles Lamb.
'Yes,' said Lamb, 'nothing wanting but the mind.'
Why don't we both go somewhere where we can both be alone?
'Age before beauty,' Clare Boothe Luce said to Dorothy Parker when they met outside a swing door.
'And pearls before swine,' said Mrs. Parker as she went through first.
God gave you a nose so that you keep your mouth closed.
'If I had a son who was an idiot, I would make him a parson,' said one of Sydney Smith's many antagonists to him.
'Your father was evidently of a different opinion,' Smith replied.
I know that you're not really two-faced in spite of the impression you give. If you were, why on earth would you be wearing that one?
Alexander Pope occasionally found that sneering at another's ignorance left him open to attack as well. When he mockingly asked one young man whether he knew what an interrogation was, he was given the stinging answer:
'Yes, sir, 'tis a little crooked thing that asks questions.'
Yes, he's certainly forceful in his arguments. He bounces back almost as quickly as his cheques.
Alexander Woollcott was discussing the possibility of mounting a revival of Macbeth on Broadway when the actress Peggy Wood, joined the group.
'We're discussing the cast,' the bluff Woollcott told her. 'But I don't think you'd make a very good Lady Macbeth, Peggy, do you?'
'No, Alec,' she said, 'but you would.'
When George Nathan saw the picture of Mae West depicting the Statue of Liberty, symbolically freeing Americans from their moral inhibitions, bis only comment was:
'She looks more like the Statue of Libido.'
Do remember that the mosquito that buzzes the loudest is the first to get squashed.
Cecil Wilson asked Noel Coward why an actor, of whom Coward had a very low opinion, had gone into the theatre in the first place. Coward told him:
'He didn't.'
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