The Book of Great Funny One-Liners (6 page)

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

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.

Michael Billington, British drama critic

A day away from Tallulah Bankhead is like a month in the country.

Anonymous comment on the American actress

Bette and I are very good friends. There’s nothing I wouldn’t say to her face—both of them.

Tallulah Bankhead on Bette Davis

Mr Lorre’s idea of playing a he-man was to extend his chest and then follow it slowly around stage.

Heywood Broun, American journalist

It’s great to be with Bill Buckley, because you don’t have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you’re right.

J.K. Galbraith, Canadian American economist

William F. Buckley looks and sounds not unlike Hitler—but without the charm.

American writer Gore Vidal on the politically conservative television personality

Anyone who lies about Gore Vidal is doing him a kindness.

William F. Buckley Jnr, American critic

With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

George Burns, American comedian

The best that can be said about Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

Bill Bryson, American writer

Joan Collins unfortunately can’t be with us tonight. She’s busy attending the birth of her next husband.

John Parrott, British presenter

He directed rehearsals with the airy deftness of a rheumatic deacon producing Macbeth for a church social.

Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist

Most of it is so slowly paced you could not only pour yourself a drink between lines of dialogue, but add ice too.

Evening Standard
on
Shaft’s Big Score

A first night audience consists of the unburied dead.

Orson Bean, British actor

Me no Leica.

Critic Caroline Lejeune on
I Am A Camera

A.E. Matthews ambled his way through the play like a charming retriever who has buried a bone and can’t quite remember where.

Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist

Edward Woodward—his name sounds like someone farting in the bath.

Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist

In Hollywood, writers are only considered the first drafts of human beings.

Frank Deford, American journalist

My favourite comedian is Frank Carson. Over the years I have enjoyed his joke very much.

Ken Dodd on a fellow British comedian

He played the king as if afraid that at any moment someone would play the ace.

American writer Eugene Field reviewing an actor’s performance

Dear Ingrid Bergman—speaks five languages and can’t act in any of them.

British actor John Gielgud on the Swedish-American actor

Before television, people didn’t know what a headache looked like.

D. Fields, American critic

He emits an air of overwhelming vanity combined with some unspecific nastiness, like a black widow spider in heat. But nobody seems to notice. He could be reciting ‘Fox’s Book of Martyrs’ in Finnish and these people would be rolling out of their seats.

British playwright Roger Gellert on British comedian John Cleese

My dear chap! Good isn’t the word!

British librettist W.S. Gilbert greeting an actor in his dressing room after a particularly bad performance.

A script of
Brideshead Revisited
needs an intravenous dose of syrup of figs or just a bullet.

A.A. Gill, British columnist

The plays of Samuel Beckett remind me of something Sir John Betjamen might do if you filled him up with Benzedrine and then force-fed him with Guinness intravenously.

Tom Davis, British journalist

You always knew where you were with Sam Goldwyn. Nowhere.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, American writer

It’s greater than a masterpiece—why, it’s mediocre!

Samuel Goldwyn, American film studio director

There is less to this than meets the eye.

American actor Tallulah Bankhead commenting on a play

Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call girls.

Jackie Gleason, American comedian

Any picture in which Errol Flynn is the best actor is its own worst enemy.

Ernest Hemingway, American writer

He gives her class and she gives him sex.

Katharine Hepburn on fellow American actors Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

It’s a new low for actresses when you have to wonder what’s between her ears instead of her legs.

Katherine Hepburn on fellow American actor Sharon Stone

Television is still in its infancy—that’s why you have to get up and change it so often.

Michael Hynes, American journalist

Film directors are people too short to become actors.

Josh Greenfield, American journalist

His critiques of films are subtle and can be very amusing, especially the ones he hasn’t seen.

British artist David Hockney on American film director Billy Wilder

My seventh film,
The Cool Mikado,
had the appearance of being made in a wind tunnel.

Frankie Howard, British comic actor

She knows when she should go on and she knows when she should go off—it’s the bit in between that foxes her.

Hugh Hunt

As an actress, her only flare is in her nostrils.

Pauline Kael, American critic

Hook and Ladder
is the sort of play that gives failure a bad name.

Walter Kerr, American critic

As in the outfitting of the
Titanic,
no expense has been spared on this production of
The Romans in Britain.

Francis King, American critic

When it comes to acting, Joan Rivers has the range of a wart.

American critic Stewart Klein on the comedian

Here’s where we get out the thesaurus and look up synonyms for ‘garbage.’

American critic Mike LaSalle on the movie
Shanghai Knights

Michael Caine can out-act any, well nearly any, telephone kiosk you care to mention.

Hugh Leonard, Irish dramatist

I cannot sing, dance or act—what else would I be but a talk show host.

David Letterman, American television presenter

The plot of
Who Killed Agatha Christie?
has as many holes as a sieve and is far less entertaining.

Bernard Levin, British journalist

In this production of
Macbeth,
the prompter stole the show.

Peter Lewis, American critic

For the eye, too much; for the ear, too little; for the mind, nothing at all.

British journalist Bernard Levin on Franco Zefirelli’s
Othello

Raquel Welch is silicone from the knees up.

Gorge Masters, American critic

I knew right away that Rock Hudson was gay when he did not fall in love with me.

Italian actor Gina Lollogrigida on the American actor Rock Hudson

I had a video made of my recent knee operation. The doctor said it was the best movie I ever starred in.

Shirley MacLaine, American actor

She is one of the few actresses in Hollywood history who looks more animated in still photographs than she does on the screen.

American radio pesenter Michael Medved on American actor Raquel Welch

Hollywood is a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.

Wilson Mizner, American playwright

David Frost is the bubonic plagiarist.

Jonathan Miller on fellow British screenwriter and television presenter

We used to have actresses trying to become stars; now we have stars trying to become actresses.

Sir Laurence Olivier, British actor

I’ve spent several years in Hollywood, and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.

Wilson Mizner, American playwright

Miss United Dairies herself.

British actor David Niven on American actor Jayne Mansfield who was famous for her impressive décolletage

I suspect that Beckett is a confidence trick perpetrated on the twentieth century by a theatre-hating God. He remains the only playwright in my experience capable of making forty minutes seem like an eternity and the wrong kind of eternity at that.

British critic Sheridan Morley on Irish playwright Samuel Beckett

One of those inexplicable farces which capture the hearts of countless London-goers, despite plots of appalling banality and dialogue that writers of cat-food commercials might well spurn.

British critic Sheridan Morley on
No
Sex
Please
—
We’re British

If you’re not careful, I’ll play this scene as you want it.

Claude Raines, American actor on being micro-managed by a director