The Book of Great Funny One-Liners (4 page)

Matthew Campbell, Australian footballer

If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he surely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday.

American journalist H.L. Mencken on president Franklin D. Roosevelt

When German-American politician Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, I gave up satire on the grounds of unfair competition.

Tom Lehrer, American musical satirist

I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.

Ronald Reagan, American president

Politicians are like nappies. They should be changed regularly and for the same reason.

Patrick Murray, Britsh actor

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel.

John Quintan, British commentator

Self-esteem is a good thing but anyone who has ever toilet trained a child knows that it is possible to make too much of the efforts of the child on the potty. One wonders if little Ed Koch was told once too often what a great thing he’d done and began to think that all that emanated from his being was pretty great.

Peggy Noonan. American writer

Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.

Mort Sahl, American comedian

There are only a few original jokes and most of them are in Congress.

Will Rogers, American humorist

Theodore Roosevelt was an old maid with testosterone poisoning.

Patricia O’Toole, American writer

John Tyler has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was a man of monumental littleness.

Theodore Roosevelt, American president

I fired Douglas McArthur because he wouldn’t respect the office of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was.

Harry S. Truman, American president

Arthur Scargill couldn’t negotiate his way out of a toilet.

Ray Lynk, American businessman

The news of President Eisenhower’s campaigning for Richard Nixon depresses me. After a clear record of eight years, I hate to see him involved in politics.

Mort Sahl, American comedian

I have nothing against Nicholas Ridley’s wife or family, but I think it’s time he spent more time with them.

Philip Goodhart, British politician

Congressmen are so damned dumb, they could throw themselves on the ground and miss.

James Traficant, American politician

Dan Quayle taught the kids a valuable lesson: if you don’t study you could end up Vice-President.

Jay Leno, American television presenter

I never accepted a knighthood because to me honour is enough. Besides, they get one into disreputable company.

George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

Quoting Ronald Reagan accurately is called mud slinging.

Walter Mondale, American vice president

The illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.

Clement Atlee on Russian communism

As for the look on Dan Quayle’s face—how to describe it? If a tree fell in a forest, and there was no one to hear it, it might sound like Dan Quayle looks.

Tom Shales, American critic

The President is going to lead us out of this recovery.

Dan Quayle, American vice president

Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.

Ann Richards, former Governor of Texas

George Bush’s problem is that the clothes have no emperor.

Anna Quindlen, American writer

Paul Shannon is educated beyond his intelligence.

Dennis Skinner, British politician

You have to get to know Dewey to dislike him.

Robert A. Taft, American politician

They inculcate the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.

Samuel Johnson, English writer and lexicographer, on Lord Chesterfield’s letters of advice to his son

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

H.L. Mencken, American journalist and political commentator

Margaret Beckett looks like a woman resigned to walk home alone to an empty bed-sit after Grab-a-Granny night at the local disco.

Richard Littlejohn, British writer

The idea of Prince Charles conversing with vegetables is not quite so amusing when you remember that he’s had plenty of practice chatting to members of his own family.

Jaci Stephens, British journalist

What is art? Prostitution.

Charles Baudelaire, French writer

It makes me look as if I were straining a stool.

Winston Churchill commenting on his famous portrait by Graham Sutherland

A decorator tainted with insanity.

American art critic Kenyon Cox on Paul Gauguin

When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I feel sorry—for the clothes.

Josh Billings, American humorist

Mona Lisa looks as if she has just been sick or is about to be.

Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist

A living is made by selling something everybody needs at least once a year. And a million is made by producing something that everybody needs every day. You artists produce something nobody needs at any time.

Thornton Wilder, American playwright

I am the only woman in the world who had had her dresses rejected by the Salvation Army.

Phyllis Diller, American comedian

Saint Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays.

Coo Chanel on fellow French couturier Yves Saint Laurent

I wouldn’t have that hanging in my home. It would be like living with a gas leak.

Dame Edith Evans, British actor

Another word from you, and I’ll paint you as you are!

A frustrated German artist Max Leiberman to a sitter who wouldn’t shut up

I am lonesome. They are all dying. I have hardly a warm personal enemy left.

James McNeill Whistler, American painter

The murals in restaurants are about on par with the food in art galleries.

Peter de Vries, American editor

The goitrous, torpid and squinting husks provided by Matisse in his sculpture are worthless except as tactful decorations for a mental home.

Percy Wyndham-Lewis, Canadian-British painter

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit

Your right to wear a mint-green polyester leisure suit ends where it meets my eyes.

Fran Leibowitz, American wit

Far too noisy, my dear Mozart, far too many notes…

Archduke Ferdinand of Austria on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

For three hundred years flautists tried to play in tune. Then they gave up and invented vibrato.

George Barrere, French flautist

An ambulatory hamburger.

Beast
magazine’s description of US country and western singer Toby Keith

When an opera star sings her head off, she usually improves her appearance.

Victor Borge, Danish-American humorist and musician

The world we live in is in a funny state. Someone goes out and shoots John Lennon and lets Des O’Connor live.

Roy Brown, British comedian

A glorified bandmaster.

British composer Thomas Beecham on Italian composer Arturo Toscanini

The true gentleman is a man who knows how to play the bagpipes but doesn’t.

British composer Thomas Beecham on fellow British composer Edward Elgar

British conductor Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band master who stood against anything creative in the art of his time.

John Fowles, British novelist

Liszt’s bombast is bad; it is very bad; in fact there is only one thing worse in his music, and that is his affected and false simplicity. It was said of George Sand that she had a habit of speaking and writing concerning chastity in such terms that the very word became impure; so it is with the simplicity of Liszt.

American critic Philip Hale on Hungarian composer Franz Liszt

Perhaps it was because Nero played the fiddle, they burned Rome.

Oliver Herford, American writer

Modern music is just noise with attitude.

Patrick Murray, British actor

Liszt’s so-called piano music is nothing but Chopin and brandy.

James Huneker, American music critic

How could I possibly have a sexual relationship with a fifty-year-old fossil? I have a beautiful boyfriend of twenty-eight. Why should I swap for a dinosaur?

Italian singer and model Carla Bruni on Mick Jagger. Bruni has nevertheless dated Eric Clapton, Kevin Costner and Donald Trump, and in 2008 married 53-year-old French president Nicolas Sarkozy

This man has child-bearing lips.

American comedian Joan Rivers on Mick Jagger

I don’t understand anything about the ballet. All I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.

Anton Chekov, Russian playwright

Splitting the convulsively inflated larynx of the Muse, Berg utters tortured mistuned cackling, a pandemonium of chopped-up orchestral sounds, mishandled men’s throats, bestial outcries, bellowing, rattling, and all other evil noises… Berg is the poisoner of the well of German music.

German review of Austrian composer Alban Berg

Berlioz composes by splashing his pen over the manuscript and leaving the issue to chance.

Polish composer Frederic Chopin on French composer Hector Berlioz

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

Peter de Vries, American editor

I can compare
Le Carnival Romain
by Berlioz to nothing but the caperings and gibberings of a big baboon, over-excited by a dose of alcoholic stimulus.

George Templeton Strong, British critic

Of all the bulls that live, this hath the greatest ass’s ears.

Elizabeth I on John Bull

He was ignored till he began to smash the parlour furniture, throw bombs and hitch together ten pianolas, all playing different tunes, whereupon everyone began to talk about him.

American music critic Henry T. Fink on Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg

Rock is a little boy’s playground and little boys don’t talk about anything that women are interested in or concerned about. Apart from how big their willies are.

Joe Fuzzbox, British writer

Jazz has a bad name because some of it is crap, and it’s boring.

Jools Holland, British musician

Madonna is so hairy—when she lifted up her arm, I thought it was Tina Turner in her armpit.

Joan Rivers, American comedian

Take a look at Keith Richard’s face. He’s turned into leather. He’s a giant suitcase. He has a handle on his head. That’s how they move him around at concerts.

Denis Leary, American comedian

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