great zings throughout history

"they never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." - thomas brackett reed

"a modest little person, with much to be modest about." - winston churchill

Reporter: What do you think of western civilization?

Mahatma Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

“Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so” = bertrand russell

Judge: I have read your case, Mr Smith, and I am no wiser now than I was when I started.
Smith: Possibly not, My Lord, but much better informed.

1st Earl Birkenhead

telegrams

Bernard Shaw: "Have reserved two tickets for first night. Come and bring a friend if you have one."

Churchill: "Impossible to come to first night. Will come to second night, if you have one."

"He can't help it - he was born with a silver foot in his mouth."
- Ann Richards (about George Bush)

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

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.

sigh

Gore Vidal's essays consist of three dozen zings strung together.

xp - i think it would be more accurately analysed down to "I distrust the veracity of Kerouac's claim that he wrote it in three days and, anyway, if so, this would not impact its literary value, and certainly would not impress its value upon me, as Kerouac seems to think it would"

by this point the fun of it is sort of dead, though

Well, that's pretty much what I was saying. And I disagree that working in that way is necessarily detrimental to good art - hence my defence of phenomenological writing. Obviously, not all art created in such a way will be good, but to suggest that it is simply not writing is fallacious.

xposts

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

this is confusing way of thinking to me

great zing lawyers throughout history

worth posting, for those who haven't seen: http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/the-churchill-wit/

I like Gore Vidal's famous one from just after Norman Mailer had decked him - "as usual, words fail him".

i will never understand 'too on the nose' as a criticism

'this thing is as it should be, only, too much so'

maybe because thats not what it means

i do believe its possible that you will some day understand it tho

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

i've seen this quote with "vassar" instead of "the yale prom" elsewhere

lagoon's criticism is basically "oh yeah mr. witty person, with yr stinkin' wit, there, and your BOOKS? well I bet you have ~no social life~ lol"

worth posting, for those who haven't seen: http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/the-churchill-wit/

― s.clover, Sunday, April 29, 2012 2:00 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

lol

lagoon's criticism is basically "oh yeah mr. witty person, with yr stinkin' wit, there, and your BOOKS? well I bet you have ~no social life~ lol"

― cosi fan whitford (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, April 29, 2012 3:47 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a v poor reading!

it's a v. poor reading... LOUSY BOOKS

yeah i thought he was just saying that 'zings' are more a product of real time communication (IRL conversation, internet etc) than written correspondence or literature

that and a lot of them are just 'i throw yr book out the window!' oohhhh

like why is nabokov pretending faulkner is some sort of horrible writer, he mad

i demand veracity in my zings

i think it's a little short-sighted to not acknowledge that there was a huge gulf of culture and context between capote and kerouac or nabakov and faulkner, just because they're all in the canon now doesn't mean one guy was a moron for not loving another, let them have their salty putdowns

oh they can have them

to be sure most literary greats were often lonely guys sitting in rooms fuming with professional jealousy, it just seems silly to knock them for that like every other zinger in this thread was a super confident rock star

i have nothing against lonely guys in rooms but the desk gangster routine is just kinda tiresome when its so clearly motivated by professional competition, i mean there are some quality zings iit but a lot of them just dont land imho

anyway ive clearly become that which i most despise re my initial zing scholar post, everyone plz post the zings

you're putting a little too much effort into summarizing ilx there bro

xpost

meta thread grubbing

Brummell after being snubbed by the Prince Regent : "Lol, Alvanley, who's your fat friend?"

zingin baout things

i have nothing against lonely guys in rooms but the desk gangster routine is just kinda tiresome when its so clearly motivated by professional competition

don't overlook the pleasure of unmitigated malice though.

icey otm to the extent that some of these literary zings are excessively artificed, lapidary to a fault but more like a studied reduction of bile than bile itself

and when it's just some deskbound bpd case like capote or a pinchfaced cocksucker like martin amis then it's just so much imaginary soirée squabbling bereft of the timing and event of the real thing

"Pinchfaced cocksucker" is for Amis a compliment.

Casey Stengel had maybe the greatest accidental zing ever: "I got a kid, Greg Goosen, he's 20 years old and in ten years he's got a chance to be 30." (You'll come across a dozen slightly different versions of this.)

By calling that accidental, I'm probably buying into the caricature of Stengel as a doddering old man; he was exceptionally smart about baseball, and may have known exactly what he was saying about Goosen there.

Greatest cricket sledge zing of all time:

Glenn McGrath to Eddo Brandes: "How come you're so fucking fat?"
Brandes: "Because every time I fuck your wife she gives me a biscuit"

Rufus T. Firefly: Not that I care, but where is your husband?"
Gloria Teasdale: Why, he's dead.
Rufus T. Firefly: I bet he's just using that as an excuse.
Gloria Teasdale: I was with him til the very end.
Rufus T. Firefly: No wonder he passed away.

from the same scene: Don't look now, but there's one too many people in this room and I think it's you.

i could swear i saw a clip of capote actually saying that kerouac line, but that what he actually said was "that isn't writing, that's...just...TYPEWRITING!"

this isnt handwriting, its typewriting! *gets the vapors*

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...

i kinda think of nabokov's critical views as just an extension of his artistic character, no less than any of his novels -- most of his interviews have the exact same 'voice' as most of his fiction. it's funny that he claimed to hate 'death in venice,' since 'lolita' could be read as an answer to it (or a parody of it).

tbh i've come to feel that gore vidal's zings are probably his best and most lasting works of art. i tried picking up that huge book of his essays a while back and most of them are a slog.

Ignore the political writing and concentrate on the lit crit (the lit crit is political too): his essays on Mencken, James, Wharton -- classic explication de text. And he deserves credit for reviving interest in Dawn Powell and James Purdy, not to mention breaking Calvino on these shores.

I'll defend Burr and Lincoln as great novels too.

i have nothing against lonely guys in rooms but the desk gangster routine is just kinda tiresome

Really considering this for a display name.

a zing of beauty doesn't need all this contextual analysis, nor does it need to be an instant riposte nor a product of bile, sometimes a zing's just a zing, here's something mean about u i thought of, lol. *telegrams churchill*. Medium's not rly that important imo.

a zing of beauty is a joy forever

Drunk Jack Kerouac at poetry reading: Frank O'Hara, you're destroying American poetry!

O'Hara: That's more than you've ever done for it.

darragh OTM

Yeah IMO, that is why ILX can be funny to read, like obviously once it gets to be an intense clusterfuck thread it's not fun at all but when it's something milder and I have no personal horse in the race, watching people throw off rejoinders and ripostes, when they're good, is really entertaining. And ILX is great for this because, behind the more visible monuments of the heated vicious threads, there's a whole lot of people killing time talking about something that nobody actually takes all that seriously.

the zinger games

most of [Nabokov's] interviews have the exact same 'voice' as most of his fiction.

iirc, he'd require the interviewer's list of questions be submitted to him, with his responses entirely written rather than spontaneous.

ahead of his time with that one

then he would revise his answers!

xpost

lot of amazing zing scholarship itt... not

― lag∞n, Sunday, April 29, 2012 11:50 AM

lock thread pls

irc, he'd require the interviewer's list of questions be submitted to him, with his responses entirely written rather than spontaneous.

Cf., Nat Hentoff's 1966 Dylan interview in Playboy, espcially Dylan's explanation of how he became a rock and roll star. From the same interview:

PLAYBOY: Did you ever have the standard boyhood dream of growing up to be President?
DYLAN: No. When I was a boy, Harry Truman was President; who'd want to be Harry Truman?

no im srs lock the thread

:-/

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."