One of the biggest untruths ever told is, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”.
If words didn’t hurt, nobody would say, “You’re as ugly as a salad”, as the Bulgarians do, or call someone, “a man with a fork in a world of soup”, as Noel Gallagher said of his brother Liam.
I love the snarl, anger, swagger, and the sheer wit of insults.
Ever since the first nomad shouted, “May the fleas of a million camels infest your armpits”, humans have been inventive at dishing the dirt. And Twitter’s not far from Shakespeare.
“Cream-faced loon” (Macbeth) and “Mangled apricot hellbeast” (@queenbernstein on Trump) are siblings, born centuries apart.
Scorn can be eloquent, as when Oscar Wilde said, “The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster”, or brutal, as when a Nicaraguan dictator crowed, “You won the elections, but I won the count”, or rueful, as when, having lost an election, a former US Congressman said, “The people have spoken – damn them”.
What all good scorn shares is accuracy. “How can they tell?” asked Dorothy Parker, when told famously boring President Calvin Coolidge had died.
“Maybot” (of Theresa May) or “a barmaid’s idea of a gentleman” (Robert Harris on Jacob Rees-Mogg MP) derive their venom from a shaft of honest observation.
When scorn is dished out between equals, I say let rip.
“What’s the difference between God and Bono?” asked Louis Walsh. “God doesn’t wander down Grafton Street thinking He’s Bono.”
Here are the best insults
- Sir Tim Rice - It is not true that Andrew Lloyd Webber and I are no longer speaking to each other. I saw his last show. At least I hope it was his last show.
- George Clooney - I’d rather have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands than have a Facebook page.
- Amy Schumer on the Kardashians - A whole family of women who take the faces they were born with as a light suggestion.
- Simon Jenkins - It is easier to cancel a nuclear submarine than a civil servant’s parking space.
- Aneurin Bevan - No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical and social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party... So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
- Lord Carrington on Margaret Thatcher. Attrib - That f***ing stupid, petite bourgeois woman.
- Clive James - There is something about David Cameron that bothers me – those features of his are still waiting to turn into a face.
- Ian Martin on Boris Johnson - A gurgling loaf with a sheepdog’s haircut and a repertoire of Latin bum jokes.
- Dennis Lillee on Geoff Boycott - The only fellow I’ve met who fell in love with himself at a young age and has remained faithful ever since.
- Daryll Cullinan and Shane Warne as the former came out to bat - Warne: I’ve been waiting two years for another chance at you. Cullinan: Looks like you spent it eating.
- Noël Coward - Television? Television is for being on, dear boy, not for watching.
- Bette Davis - You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good ... Joan Crawford is dead. Good.
- Owen Jones on Twitter - Had this weird dream Theresa May humiliated herself in snap election and clung to power with homophobe fundamentalist terrorist sympathisers.
- David Baddiel - The Rev Ian Paisley has died. The authorities have asked that we should all observe a minute’s shouting.
- Jack Whitehall - Wherever my dad is now, he’s looking down on me ... Not because he is dead, but because he is very condescending.
- Sharon Stone - Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.
- George Burns - Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
- David Susskind on Elizabeth Taylor in 1963 film Cleopatra - Overweight, overbosomed, overpaid and under-talented, she set the acting profession back a decade.
- Joan Rivers - Elizabeth Taylor has more chins than the Chinese telephone directory.
- Dame Thora Hird - The best thing that comes out of Yorkshire is the road to Lancashire
- Scorn: The Wittiest and Wickedest Insults in Human History, by Matthew Parris (Profile, £8.99).