Dorothy Parker turned the putdown into high art. Here’s a handpicked anthology of the essential Dorothy Parker insults.
Book reviews
Dorothy Parker’s Constant Reader column in The New Yorker sparked some of her most famous insults.
Reviewing Margot Asquith’s Lay Sermons:
“The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.”
Reviewing The House at Pooh Corner:
“Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
“Mr. Beebe’s “Snoot If You Must” (it is surely some dark, dark masochism that makes me say that title again) is widely advertised for the Christmas trade. It must be what I believe is known as a gift book. That is to say, a book which you wouldn’t take on any other terms.”
Reviewing The Glass Key:
“The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer.”
Theatre reviews
Parker was fired as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic for being too savage. Luckily for fans of Dorothy Parker insults, she found a new home at The New Yorker.
“Katharine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.”
“The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.”
On Dame Edith Evans:
“Edith looks like something that would eat her young.”
On Marion Davies:
“Miss Davies has two expressions—joy and indigestion.”
On the audiences for Oscar Wilde plays:
“They have a conscious exquisiteness, a deep appreciation of their own culture.”
“The only thing I didn’t like about The Barretts of Wimpole Street was the play.”
More funny theatre quotes, quips and insults
Ripostes
Some of the funniest Dorothy Parker insults were delivered on the fly.
Asked to use the word horticulture in a game of Give-Me-A-Sentence:
“You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”
Told that Calvin Coolidge had died:
“How can they tell?”
Told that a talkative friend was outspoken:
“By whom?”
Told that Clare Boothe Luce was kind to her inferiors:
“Where does she find them?”
Clare Boothe Luce, meeting Parker at a doorway: “Age before beauty.”
Dorothy Parker gliding in ahead: “Pearls before swine.”
Fellow party guest: “I simply can’t bear fools.”
Dorothy Parker: “Apparently your mother did not have the same difficulty.”
Sex, love and lovers
Many Dorothy Parker insults gained their charge by cutting through cant and propriety, none more so than these quotes on couples and coupling.
On the Yale prom:
“If all the girls attending were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
On John McClain, one of her lovers:
“His body went to his head.”
“That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say “No” in any of them.”
“Scratch a lover, and find a foe.”
“Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.”
“The Technique of the Love Affair makes considerable sense. If only it had been written and placed in my hands years ago, maybe I could have been successful instead of just successive.”
“Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman’s moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun…
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?”
“Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.”
Telegram to Mary Sherwood, following an well-publicised pregnancy:
“Dear Mary. We all knew you had it in you.”
More witty cynics on lovers, love, sex and marriage.
One more drink
Dorothy Parker liked a drink or two, if not the insults to health or decorum that might follow.
“Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”
“A hangover is the wrath of grapes.”
“One more drink and I’ll be under the host.”
What fresh hell?
In which Dorothy Parker insults life, death and the rocky road from one to the other.
Her frequent response to the bell announcing a caller:
“What fresh hell can this be?”
On a recent illness:
“The doctors were very brave about it.”
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
“Sometimes I think I’ll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.”
“People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.”
“Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”
Writing for a living
These next Dorothy Parker insults suggest that she was not entirely enamoured of all aspects of the writer’s life.
“Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.”
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”
Asked by an editor why an assignment wasn’t finished:
“Too fucking busy and vice versa.”
“Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.”
Money and the monied
If money is the root of all evil, this set of Dorothy Parker insults suggests she loved the sin but hated the sinner.
“If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.”
“I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.”
Identifying her favourite words in the English language:
“Cheque and enclosed.”
“Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.”
“I saw many rich people, and they did much to send me back to the masses, to make me proud of being a worker…the rich are our best propagandists.”
Dorothy Parker on Dorothy Parker
Many of Dorothy Parker’s insults were self-deprecating. Here is Dottie on her life and legacy.
“For years, you see, I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema.”
“I don’t want to be classed as a humorist. There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
“I was just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”
Friends and fellow writers on Dorothy
We end our collection of Dorothy Parker insults with some outside perspectives on the queen of the Algonquin Round Table.
“None of the Algonquin group identified strongly with the Lost Generation, except perhaps Dorothy Parker, who would have identified with anything lost.”
James R. Gaines
“A combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.”
Alexander Woollcott
“Everything I’ve ever said will be credited to Dorothy Parker.”
George S. Kaufman
You can learn more about the life of Dottie Parker in the New York Times obituary (archived on the Dorothy Parker Society website).