The Book of Great Funny One-Liners Read online

I never watch the Dinah Shore Show—I’m a diabetic.

  Oscar Levant, American musician and wit

  His wantonness is not vicious. It is that of a great baby, rather tirelessly addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.

  George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright on Johannes Brahms

  Brassy, brazen witch on a mortgaged broomstick, a steamroller with cleats.

  Broadway theatre critic Walter Kerr on American singer and actor Ethel Merman

  The audience seemed rather disappointed: they expected the ocean, something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer.

  Critic Louis Schneider on La Mer by French composer Claude Debussy

  Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff that I ever saw on a human stage, that last night beat as far as the story and acting went all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tuneless, scrabble-pipiest-tongs and boniest-doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was deadliest, as far as its sound went.

  British essayist John Ruskin on Richard Wagner

  I liked the bit about quarter to eleven.

  French composer Erik Satie on La Mer by French composer Claude Debussy

  He sang like a hinge.

  American singer and actor Ethel Merman on American composer Cole Porter

  The concert is a polite form of self-imposed torture.

  Henry Miller, American writer

  … all England needs—another queen who can’t dress.

  American comedian Joan Rivers on British singer Boy George

  If there is music in hell it will be bagpipes.

  Joe Tomelty, British writer

  His vibrato sounded like he was driving a tractor over ploughed fields with weights tied to his scrotum.

  Spike Milligan, British actor and comedian

  If I found her floating in my pool, I’d punish my dog.

  American comedian Joan Rivers on Japanese-American artist Yoko Ono

  Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.

  American critic Ralph Novak on Yoko Ono

  A provincial Debussy.

  British historian A. J. P Taylor on Frederick Delius

  Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

  British writer H.H. Munro, better known as Saki

  Some people exist who like to see their names in print. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are print junkies.

  Germaine Greer, Australian feminist

  Rachmaninov’s immortalising totality was his scowl. He was a six and a half foot scowl.

  Igor Stravinsky on fellow Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov

  The musical equivalent of blancmange.

  Journalist Bernard Levin on the work of fellow Brit, the composer Frederick Delius

  Spinning Wheel, by Blood, Sweat and Tears, is music to commit voluntary euthanasia by.

  Simon Hoggart, British journalist

  The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.

  George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

  Schoenberg would be better off shovelling snow.

  German composer Richard Strauss on Austrian-Hungarian composer Arnold Schoenberg

  I’ve always said that there’s a place for the press but they haven’t dug it yet.

  Tommy Docherty, Scottish footballer

  This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he was profoundly ignorant.

  Thomas B. Macaulay, British essayist

  Mr Robin Day asks me to vouch for the fact that he can sing. I testify that the noise he makes is in fact something between that of a cat drowning, a lavatory flushing and a hyena devouring her after birth in the Appalachian Mountains under a full moon.

  British writer Auberon Waugh on the British political broadcaster

  The approach of Frankie Lane to the microphone is that of an accused man pleading with a hostile jury.

  Kenneth Tynan, British writer

  After Rossini dies, who will there be to promote his music?

  German composer Richard Wagner on Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini

  Madam, I have cried only twice in my life; once when I dropped a wing of truffled chicken into Lake Como, and once for the first time I heard you sing.

  Gioacchino Rossini, Italian composer

  He is to piano playing as David Soul is to acting; he makes Jacques Loussier sound like Bach; he reminds us how cheap potent music can be.

  Welsh conductor Richard Williams on French pianist Richard Clayderman

  With regard to Gounod’s Redemption, if you will only take the precaution to go in long enough after it commences and to come out long enough before it is over, you will not find it wearisome.

  George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

  Penners and Inkers

  No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived but most of them wish they were the only one alive and quite a few fondly believe their wish has been granted.

  W.H. Auden, British writer

  I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

  Aneurin Bevan, British politician

  Journalists are people who take in other people’s washing and then sell it.

  Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, Australian writing team

  Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.

  Roy Blount, American writer

  Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.

  British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson on Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle

  Sitting in a sewer and adding to it.

  Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle describing the poetry of Algernon Swinburne.

  He not only overfilled with learning but stood in the slop.

  Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle on British writer Thomas Babington Macaulay

  I did so enjoy your book, darling. Everything that everybody writes in it is so good.

  Mrs Patrick Campbell, British actor

  Standing up to his neck in a cesspool and adding to its contents.

  American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson on Algernon Swinburne

  … with brass knobs on a gap-toothed and hoary ape, carried at first notice on the shoulder of Carlyle … who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his finding and fouling: coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons, who make the filth they feed on.

  Algernon Swinburne on both Emerson and Carlyle

  For those of us without the dubious benefit of a classical education autocoprophagous means eating your own shit.

  Scottish writer and essayist Thomas Carlyle

  Perhaps the saddest lot that can befall a mortal man is to be the husband of a lady poet.

  George Jean Nathan, American critic

  He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

  British clergyman Sydney Smith on Thomas Babington Macaulay

  Isn’t it a shame that Maxwell Anderson’s poetic licence has expired.

  Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist

  A woman once incessantly pestered English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson to read her play. Johnson told her that if she read it carefully herself, she’d find all the things he’d most likely ask her to correct.

  ‘But sir,’ she said, ‘I have no time. I have already so many irons in the fire.’

  ‘Well then, madam, the best thing that I can advise you is to put your tragedy along with your irons.’

  His imagination resembles the wings of an ostrich.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay on British writer John Dryden

  Warren Harding, the only man, or woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatica
l errors, is dead.

  e.e. cummings, American poet

  I do not hate the critics. I have nothing but compassion for them. How can I hate the crippled, the mentally deficient and the dead?

  Albert Finney, British actor

  Critics are just eunuchs at a gangbang.

  George Burns, American comedian

  A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

  William Faulkner on fellow American writer Mark Twain

  Conrad spent a day finding the mot juste: then killed it.

  Ford Madox Ford on fellow British writer Joseph Conrad

  Addison was responsible for many of the evils from which English prose has since suffered. He made prose artful and whimsical, he made it sonorous when sonority was not needed, affected when it did not require affectation... He was the first Man of Letters. Addison had the misuse of an extensive vocabulary and so was able to invalidate a great number of words and expressions; the quality of his mind was inferior to the language which he used to express it.

  British critic Cyril Connolly on British statesman and essayist Joseph Addison

  God created the poet, then took a handful of the rubbish left over and made three critics.

  T.J. Thomas

  If you cannot get a job as a pianist in a brothel, you become a royal reporter.

  Max Hastings, British journalist

  Dear Randolph, utterly unspoilt by failure.

  Noel Coward on Winston’s son, writer Randolph Churchill

  A triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant and remove it.

  Evelyn Waugh on fellow British writer Randolph Churchill

  Jackie Collins is to writing what her sister Joan is to acting.

  Campbell Grison, critic

  Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.

  Ernest Hemingway, American writer

  The essence of humour is surprise; that is why you laugh when you see a joke in Punch.

  A.P. Herbert, British humorist

  His ignorance was an Empire State Building of ignorance. You had to admire it for its size.

  American journalist, writer and all-round wit Dorothy Parker on New Yorker editor Harold Ross

  The Sun and Mirror have become the standard bearers of illiteracy.

  Welsh novelist Emyr Humphreys on the British tabloids.

  Barbara Cartland’s eyes were twin miracles of mascara and looked like two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

  Clive James, Australian writer

  The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.

  Lyndon B. Johnson, American president

  Indeed, the freedom with which Dr Johnson condemns whatever he disapproves is astonishing.

  Jane Welsh Carlyle, the ‘Great Victorian Wife’ of Thomas Carlyle

  A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books and decreases the number of women.

  Alphonse Kerr, Canadian politician

  The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can’t get on with them.

  Rosamond Lehmann on fellow British novelist Ian Fleming

  Drama critics are there to show gay actors what it is like to have a wife.

  Hugh Leonard, Irish dramatist

  British journalist and broadcaster Gilbert Harding was at a wedding when a fellow guest observed that the bride and groom made an ideal couple.

  “You should know,” Harding said. “You’ve slept with both of them.”

  Chuang Tzu was born in the fourth century BC. The publication of this book in English, over two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature.

  Bernard Levin, British journalist

  He is like someone on a quiz show who insists on giving answers in greater detail than is actually necessary.

  Journalist William Leith on fellow Brit, the writer and composer Anthony Burgess

  Anyone making love to Germaine Greer should have his guide dog confiscated and be awarded the Victoria Cross.

  Bernard Manning, British comedian

  His very frankness is falsity. In fact, it seems falser than his insincerity.

  New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield on her husband John Middleton Murry

  Tragedy is when I cut my little finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

  Mel Brooks, American film maker

  Before they made S.J. Perlman, they broke the mould.

  Groucho Marx, American actor and comedian

  From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

  Groucho Marx, American actor and comedian

  The triumph of sugar over diabetes.

  American drama critic George Jean Nathan on the works of British writer J.M. Barrie

  The conscientious Canadian critic is one who subscribes to the New York Times so that he knows at first hand what his opinions should be.

  Eric Nichol, Canadian critic

  A hyena that wrote poetry in tombs.

  German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche on the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri

  Kingsley Amis once said that sex was a great cure for a hangover, which indeed must be the case, because if you thought Kingsley Amis was about to make love to you, you’d certainly avoid getting drunk in the first place.

  Joseph O’Connor on his fellow British writer

  Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

  Mark Twain, American writer

  One of the surest signs of Conrad’s genius is that women dislike his works.

  George Orwell on his fellow British writer

  A huge pendulum attached to a small clock.

  Russian critic Ivan Panin on British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Take an idiot from a lunatic asylum and marry him to an idiot woman, and the fourth generation of the connection should be a good publisher from an American point of view.

  Mark Twain, American writer

  Hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil—you’ll never get a job working for a tabloid.

  Phil Pastoret, British journalist

  I would praise Joad’s new book, but modesty forbids.

  Bertrand Russell on fellow British philosopher C.E.M. Joad

  Agate: My dear Lillian. I have long wanted to tell you that in my opinion you are the second-best actress in London.

  Braithwaite: Thank you so much. I shall cherish that, coming from the second-best dramatic critic.

  An exchange between American critic James Agate and British actress Lillian Braithwaite

  ‘Mar-gott, how lovely to see you!’

  ‘No, dear, the “t” is silent, as in “Harlow”.

  An exchange between Margot Asquith and actress Jean Harlow, who, out of ignorance, pronounced the ‘t’ in Asquith’s first name.

  Only a flaw of nature prevented Vita Sackville-West from being one of nature’s gentlemen.

  Edith Sitwell, British poet

  Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else’s dirty water.

  American critic Alexander Woollcott on the French writer

  I do not think that Rousseau’s poem Ode to Posterity will reach its destination.

  Voltaire on his fellow French writer

  Who can define him? His style is chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist he can do everything except tell a story. As an artist he is everything except articulate.

  Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit on British novelist George Meredith

  There are two ways of disliking poetry. One is to dislike it. The other is to read Pope.

  Oscar Wilde, Irish play
wright and wit

  You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist, but seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

  Humbert Woolf, British writer

  I believe that I could write like Shakespeare, if I had a mind to try it.

  William Wordsworth, British poet

  Time is the only critic without ambition.

  John Steinbeck, American writer

  This film wasn’t released. It escaped.

  James Caan, American actor

  The only trouble with Seamus O’Sullivan is that when he’s not drunk he’s sober.

  W.B. Yeats on his fellow Irish poet

  Being published by the Oxford University Press is rather like being married to a duchess; the honour is greater than the pleasure.

  G.M. Young, British historian

  There’s no need for you to apologize at all. After all, I’ve never bored you half as much as you’ve bored me.

  British actor and dramatist Noel Coward to British journalist Gilbert Harding who fell asleep during one of Coward’s plays.

  Her Victoria made me feel that Albert had married beneath his station.

  Noel Coward, commenting on an actress playing the part of Queen Victoria

  It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

  Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit

  Stages, Screens and

  Boxes

  I suppose he looks all right, if your taste runs to septuagenarians with blow waves and funny stretch marks around the ears.

  British journalist Lynn Barber on the American actor Kirk Douglas

  In California, they don’t throw their garbage away—they make it into TV shows.

  Woody Allen, American film maker, comic and writer

  Elizabeth Sitwell is like a high altar on the move.

  Elizabeth Bowen, Anglo-Irish novelist

  Getting the costumes right on Cleopatra was like polishing the fish knives on the Titanic.

  Julian Barnes, American critic

  I don’t have ulcers. I give them.

  Harry Cohn, American producer

  The impact of the play was like the banging together of two damp dishcloths.

  Brendan Behan, Irish dramatist

  Peter O’Toole delivers every line with a monotonous tenor bark as if addressing an audience of deaf Eskimos.