The Mona Lisa with a cream pie splatted in her face. A famous image derided to celebrate famous insults.

Famous insults from history

Celebrating the fine art of the funny insult

Our collections of famous insults

We’ll be regularly adding new collections so come back soon.

How we select your famous insults

To become famous, an insult needs that magic ingredient that makes it memorable. For the team at Famous Insults, that magic ingredient is wit.

Our site celebrates those who have raised the witty insult to its greatest heights. You’ll meet acknowledged kings and queens of mean like Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Joan Rivers and Jon Stewart, along with the one-hit wonders whose single telling blow earns them a place in the pantheon of putdown artists.

Be they funny insults by famous people, or famous insults by funny people, we’re looking for the wittiest insults in human history. 

Finding the funniest insults ever

You may ask how we were able to ensure that the insults are indeed the wittiest ever. We determined that the best approach was to read out each famous insult to a demographic cross-section of test subjects, measuring the volume and duration of any resulting laughter.

However we became aware of certain procedural complications with this approach. Specifically we realised we’d need to do some work. So instead we used an alternative protocol whereby we selected the ones we found funny. 

Sourcing famous insults

The insults have been scribbled down from books we’ve read and TV shows and movies we’ve watched. They’ve been pulled from other collections and unearthed on the interwebs.

We followed a similarly rigorous process to determine accuracy of quote and attribution. If posterity has decided a certain individual delivered a particular quip, who are we to argue? As Mark Twain said, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. Actually there’s no record he ever said this, but if he didn’t, he should have. 

Where our research failed to nail down who said what and when, we went with the most apposite, not the most accurate, the most famous, not the first. 

Our guiding principle

So the guiding principle behind this selection, and the sole purpose of this site, is that it should make you laugh. Immoderately. If, as you read, you don’t find your snorts and giggles disturbing family, friends and fellow commuters then we have failed. 

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