Great Quips

How appearances deceive. In the 1930s a woman was seated at a banquet next to Wellington Koo, Chiang Kai-shek's foreign minister. Koo was a superbly erudite man who spoke many languages. The woman began the conversation with, "Chin-ee man, you come far on boat-ee?" She went on like this all evening, with Koo responding in nods and smiles. Finally it was time for the speeches. Koo rose and gave a stunningly brilliant discussion of the larger questions of the day. He sat down and said to the woman, "You lik-ee speech-ee?"

 And only the English could have produced David Niven. He was at a fancy ball, standing at the bottom of a grand staircase, talking to a man he had just met. Two women appeared at the top of the stairs and began to descend.

Niven said to the man, "That's the ugliest woman I've ever seen."

The man stiffened. "That's my wife."

"I meant the other one."

"That's my daughter."

Niven looked the man calmly in the eye and said, "I didn't say it!"

Carl Sandburg attended the rehearsal of a play as a favor to a young playwright. He promptly fell asleep. The writer was crushed.

"How could you sleep when you knew I wanted your opinion?" he asked.

"Young man," said Sandburg, "sleep is an opinion."

"Sir James Barrie, I presume?" began a newspaper reporter attempting to interview Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie.

Before shutting the door in his face, Barrie had just two words to say: "You do."

Walter Stone was one of the talented writers who created The Jackie Gleason Show. The pressure of working for Gleason led him to occasionally drink heavily. On one occasion he walked into a Las Vegas bar and asked for a double Scotch. "At eight in the morning?" asked the bartender incredulously.

"All right," said Stone. "Put a cornflake in it."

Khrushchev was delivering a speech before a large audience, in which he denounced the flaws of the Stalin regime.

From the audience came the voice of a heckler. "You were one of Stalin’s colleagues! Why didn’t you stop him?"

Khrushchev paused and stared into the audience. "Who said that?" he bellowed angrily.

Silence reigned, as no one answered.

"Now," said Khrushchev in a firm, quiet voice, "you know why."

In the middle years of the eighteenth century, the citizens of Pennsylvania were threatened by the French. Benjamin Franklin set about encouraging the Pennsylvanians to support their new militia.

One well-off man was hesitant. "Frankly," he asked, "why should I help to save Quakers who won’t fight to defend themselves?"

Said Franklin, "You’re like the sailor who won’t caulk the leaky ship because it would save the rats."

Singers, composers, and instrumentalists aren’t primarily known for their skill with words. Yet some extraordinarily pithy put-downs and retorts have emanated from the lips of divas and other music makers. One of the best known–ascribed to Caruso, Fritz Kreisler, and a handful of others–involves a woman who was giving a large private party and invited the musician to entertain.

"My fee is one thousand dollars," explained the entertainer.

"That’s fine" said the matron, "but you won’t be permitted to socialize with the guests."

"In that case," the musician continued, "my fee is five hundred dollars."

Groucho Marx was told that his son, Arthur, would not be permitted to swim in a "no-Jews-allowed" country club. He immediately sat down and wrote the president of the club.

"Since my little son is only half-Jewish, would it be all right if he goes into the pool only up to his waist?"

Robert Benchley was leaving a nightclub late one evening, after a few too many drinks. He encountered an epauletted man at the exit, took him to be a doorman, and asked him to hail a taxi cab. The gentleman responded, "I happen to be a rear admiral in the United States Navy."

Benchley was unabashed. "All right then, get us a battleship."