I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (8 page)

MALCOLM BRADBURY

He added: “Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.”

 

An after-dinner speech should be like a lady's dress—
long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting.

R. A. “RAB” BUTLER

Like a camel, I can go without a drink for seven days—
and have on several horrible occasions.

HERB CAEN

What Billie Holiday is to jazz,
what Mae West is to tits…
what Seconal is to sleeping pills,
what King Kong is to penises,
Truman Capote is to the great god Thespis!

TRUMAN CAPOTE,
on himself as an actor

Capote's efforts at self-promotion were legendary, and often hilarious. Thespis, a Greek poet in the sixth century B.C., is considered the world's first actor. At a time when all stage productions were choral affairs, he was the first person to deliver spoken lines. He lives on in the word
thespian
, an eponym for an actor.

 

I want to get married but I look at husbands the same way I look at tattoos.
I want one, but I can't decide what I want,
and I don't want to be stuck with something
I'd grow to hate and have surgically removed.

MARGARET CHO

Smoking cigars is like falling in love:
first you are attracted to its shape;
you stay with it for its flavor;
and you must always remember never, never let the flame go out.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

A dead bird does not leave its nest.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

This was the elderly Churchill's reply when he was once told that his fly was open. For most of his life, the Grand Old Man of English politics was on the lookout for witty replies. Many of his best, like this one, were self-deprecating.

 

Cleaning your house
While your kids are still growing
Is like shoveling the walk
Before it stops snowing.

PHYLLIS DILLER

Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.

NORA EPHRON

This was Ephron's way of pointing out that working journalists get close to the action without actually participating in it.

 

A plumber's idea of Cleopatra.

W. C. FIELDS,
on Mae West

Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath.

ARNOLD H. GLASGOW

Mothers, food, love, and career: the four major guilt groups.

CATHY GUISEWITE

Girls are like pianos.
When they're not upright, they're grand.

BENNY HILL

Humor is a rubber sword—
it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

MARY HIRSCH

I've been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air,
an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt.

MOLLY IVINS

This remark is impressive at two levels. First, being gummed by any toothless animal—much less a newt—isn't very dangerous. And second, it was a clever way for Ivins to take a back-handed jab at another foe: Newt Gingrich.

 

Don't sit in a restaurant by the tank
where they keep the lobsters—it's very depressing.
Lobsters always have that look of, “Any word from the governor?”

RICHARD JENI

If you haven't struck oil in the first three minutes,
stop boring
!

GEORGE JESSEL

In the mid-1900s, Jessel was America's most popular after-dinner speaker. By relating speech-making to oil drilling—and playfully punning on both meanings of the word
boring
—he provides great advice to anyone who is asked to “say a few words.” John Updike made a similar point when he likened boring adults to boring insects: “A healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”

 

In any world menu,
Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations—
it's cold, half-French, and difficult to stir.

J. STUART KEATE

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets.

It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.

JEAN KERR

People…have often been likened to snowflakes.

This analogy is meant to suggest that each is unique—no two alike.
This is quite patently not the case.

People…are quite simply a dime a dozen.
And, I hasten to add, their only similarity to snowflakes
resides in their invariable and lamentable tendency to turn,
after a few warm days, to slush.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered.

RING LARDNER

Lardner penned many memorable lines on the
looks
people give one another: “They gave each other a smile with a future in it” and “He gave her a look that you could pour on a waffle.” Also on the subject of looks, there is this classic line from Raymond Chandler: “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”

 

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man.
But they don't bite everybody.

STANISLAW LEC

Here's something I've never understood;
how come men have nipples?
What's the point? They're like plastic fruit.

CAROL LEIFER

I never did like working out—
it bears the same relationship to real sport
as masturbation does to real sex.

DAVID LODGE

Lodge may have been inspired by Karl Marx's famous analogical observation on the impotence of philosophy: “Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.”

 

Hickeys are like PG-13 movies.
You think they're pretty hot stuff after being limited to G and PG,
but you never bother with them once you're seriously into R.

JUDY MARKEY

A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else.
The same with good manners.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

The point is that that neither manners nor cars are necessary to get around New York. The rudeness of New Yorkers, while often not apparent to residents, is one of the first things noticed by visitors. Roy Blount, Jr., offered a similar thought when he compared Southerners with New Yorkers: “Being humorous in the South is like being…argumentative in New York…you're in trouble if you aren't.” If one were to express his thought in an analogy, it might go like this: “A sense of humor is to Southerners what a chip on the shoulder is to New Yorkers.”

 

We must respect the other fellow's religion,
but only in the sense and to the extent
that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

H. L. MENCKEN

English humor resembles the Loch Ness monster
in that both are famous but there is
a strong suspicion that neither exists.

GEORGE MIKES

The suggestion here is that English humor, because of its dry and droll quality, is often viewed as not particularly funny by Americans and others around the world.

 

We are all but sailboats on the river of life, and money is the wind.
With enough money, you can get blown anywhere.

DENNIS MILLER

In this witty
double-entendre
observation, Miller is only partially talking about being blown by the wind.

 

For a purely untrustworthy human organ,
the memory is right in there with the penis.

P. J. O'ROURKE

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope.

P. J. O'ROURKE

O'Rourke's point is that born-again Christians are such an easy target that it's not particularly impressive to make wisecracks about them.

 

TV evangelists are the pro wrestlers of religion.

RICK OVERTON

There's a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit.

Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

DOROTHY PARKER

Awards are like hemorrhoids; in the end, every asshole gets one.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

Raphael, a novelist and screenwriter, has written screenplays for many films, including Stanley Kubrick's 1999 film
Eyes Wide Shut
. He has won several awards, including an Oscar for
Darling
in 1965. I believe his remark was more of an attempt at self-deprecatory humor than a critical remark
about awards. The basic sentiment has become extremely popular, surfacing in almost every discussion of prizes and awards. In 1999, British actress Maureen Lipman said it more delicately: “Awards are like piles. Sooner or later, every bum gets one.”

 

I can't get past the fact that food is coming out of my wife's breasts.
What was once…an entertainment center has now become a juice bar.

PAUL REISER,
on breastfeeding

If you're black, you got to look at America a little bit different.
You got to look at America like the uncle who
paid for you to go to college, but who molested you.

CHRIS ROCK

The struggling for knowledge hath a pleasure in it
like that of wrestling with a fine woman.

GEORGE SAVILE
(Lord Halifax)

Lord Halifax, writing in 1690, was likely the first person in history to find an analogy between such disparate activities. His point is that both pursuits involve considerable struggle, but the pleasure associated with each is so great that the struggle is worth it.

 

People are always wanting me to smoke with them
or drink beers with them or to hook me up with chicks.
It's like I'm the Spuds MacKenzie of humans.

PAULY SHORE

Spuds Mackenzie, a bull terrier, became an overnight star after appearing in a Bud Lite beer commercial during the 1987 Super Bowl. A true party animal, the fun-loving dog also generated much publicity when it was revealed that
he
was actually a
she
.

 

It's silly for a woman to go to a male gynecologist.
It's like going to an auto mechanic who never owned a car.

CARRIE SNOW

The United States is like the guy at the party
who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him.

JIM SAMUELS

A two-year-old is like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.

JERRY SEINFELD

Experience: a comb life gives you after you lose your hair.

JUDITH STERN

As soon as you say “I do,”
you'll discover that marriage is like a car.
Both of you might be sitting in the front seat, but only one of you is driving.
And most marriages are more like a motorcycle than a car.
Somebody has to sit in the back, and you have to yell just to be heard.

WANDA SYKES

American students are like American colleges—
each has half-dulled faculties.

JAMES THURBER

I think of it as a kind of Hamburger Helper for the boudoir.

LILY TOMLIN,
speaking of a vibrator

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union,
were not perceived to have any relation.

MARK TWAIN

Our lives are like soap operas.
We can go for months and not tune into them;
then six months later we look in and
the same stuff is going on.

JANE WAGNER

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog.
Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

E. B. WHITE

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

OSCAR WILDE

Here, Wilde cleverly piggy-backs on the famous passage from
As You Like It
.

 

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—
the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

OSCAR WILDE

Nonalcoholic beer is kind of like a Nerf vibrator.
It's not really going to work.

ROBIN WILLIAMS

Spring is nature's way of saying, “Let's party!”

ROBIN WILLIAMS

Williams once said of himself, “My comedy is like emotional hang-gliding.” His remark about spring may have inspired another seasonal observation, this one from Robert Byrne: “Winter is nature's way of saying, ‘Up yours!'”

 

The lunches of fifty-seven years
had caused his chest to slip down into the mezzanine floor.

P. G. WODEHOUSE

The works of Wodehouse—a true master of metaphor—were sprinkled with numerous figurative gems, many on the subject of being overweight. Here are two more:

“(He) was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when!'”

“She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight around the hips that season.”