The Book of Great Funny One-Liners (3 page)
Read The Book of Great Funny One-Liners Online
Authors: Frank Allen
Tags: #The Book of Great Funny One-Liners
Stubby Kaye, American comic actor
She could very well pass for forty-three. In the dusk with the light behind her.
W.S. Gilbert, British librettist
Take those scales out of the bathroom; the right place for them is in front of the refrigerator.
Richard Needham, British politician
The tautness of his face sours ripe grapes.
William Shakespeare, British dramatist
A four-hundred-dollar suit on him would look like socks on a rooster.
American politician Earl Long on an anonymous rival
My mother-in-law’s face is her fortune. She pays no income tax.
Les Dawson, British comedian
Handsome? He looked like a dog’s bum with a hat on.
Spike Milligan, British actor and comedian
Outside every thin woman is a fat woman dying to get in.
Katherine Whitehorn, British journalist
I have no boobs whatsoever. On my wedding night my husband said, ‘Let me help you with those buttons’ and I told him, ‘I’m completely naked.’
Joan Rivers, American comedian
God knew from all eternity that I was going to be Pope. You think he would have made me more photogenic.
Pope John XXIII
Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.
P.G. Wodehouse, British writer
She is a peacock in everything but beauty.
Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit
Parts
When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian simply said ‘Ours’.
Vine Deloria, American anthropologist
America is a society which believes that God is dead but Elvis is alive.
Irving Kupcinet, American columnist
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to never practice either of them.
Mark Twain, American writer
I went to join the New York public library. The guy told me I had to prove I was a citizen of New York, so I stabbed him.
Emo Philips, American comedian
There won’t be any revolution in America… the people are too clean. They spend all their time changing their shirts and washing themselves. You can’t feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom.
Eric Linklater, British writer
Britain has invented a new missile. It’s called the civil servant—it doesn’t work and it can’t be fired.
Walter Walker, British general
Canada could have enjoyed English government, French culture and American know-how. Instead it ended up with English know-how, French government and American culture.
John Robert Columbo, Canadian poet
The softer the currency in a foreign country, the harder the toilet paper.
John Fountain, American writer
The English winter—ending in July, to recommence in August.
George Gordon, British academic
The only pleasure an Englishman has is in passing on his cold germs.
Gerald Durrell, British author
I like the English. The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
Thomas Beecham, British conductor
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
Virginia Woolf, British writer
The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.
Margaret Halsey, American writer
British education is probably the best in the world, if you can survive it. If you can’t there is nothing left for you but the diplomatic corps.
Peter Ustinov, British comedian and actor
The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everyone else, that there is almost nothing to resist at all.
D. H. Lawrence, British author
It is no longer true that Continentals have a sex life whereas the English have hot water bottles—the English now have electric blankets.
George Mikes, Hungarian-British writer
Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.
Samuel Johnson, English writer and lexicographer
I have been trying all my life to like Scotsmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.
Charles Lamb, English essayist
The Irish climate is wonderful, but the weather ruins it.
Tony Butler, British sports broadcaster
If one could teach the English to talk and the Irish to listen, society would be quite civilised.
Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and wit
The French don’t care what they do as long as they pronounce it properly.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright
When St Patrick first visited Ireland there was no word in the Irish language to express sobriety.
Oliver St John Gogarty, Irish physician
Given the unlikely options of attending a funeral or a sex orgy, a true Irishman will always opt for the funeral.
John B. Keane, Irish writer
A complete description of Belfast is given by: population 200,000; early closing day Wednesday.
Shamus O’Shamus, Irish comedian
Heaven is an English policeman, a French cook, a German engineer, an Italian lover and everything organised by the Swiss. Hell is an English cook, a French engineer, a German policeman, a Swiss lover and everything organised by the Italians.
John Elliot, American songwriter
The Swiss are not so much a people as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
William Faulkner, American novelist
We had a very successful trip to Russia—we got back.
Bob Hope, American comedian
An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition.
Henry Kissinger, German-American politician
Germans are flummoxed by humour, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
Bill Bryson, American author
I do not see the EEC as a great love affair. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.
Kenneth Tynan, British writer
The high standards of Australians are due to the fact that their ancestors were all handpicked by the best English judges.
Douglas Copeland, Canadian novelist
There are only two classes of persons in New South Wales—those who have been convicted and those who ought to have been.
Lachlan Macquarie, governor of the colony of New South Wales
Many people are surprised to hear we have comedians in Russia, but there they are. They are dead, but there they are.
‘Vacation’ is the word Americans use to describe going someplace different to have fun and get away from all their trials and tribulations. The English call it ‘holiday’. In Russia it’s known as ‘defecting’.
Yakov Smirnoff, Ukranian-American comedian
Correspondence
A conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.
Benjamin Disraeli, British statesman
If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune, and if anybody pulled him out of that, I suppose, would be a calamity.
Benjamin Disraeli on fellow British Prime Minister William Gladstone
He is a self-made man and worships his creator.
British statesman John Bright on Benjamin Disraeli
He never spares himself in conversation. He gives himself so generously that hardly anyone else is permitted to give anything in his presence.
British politician Aneurin Bevan on Winston Churchill
Aneurin Bevan is a thrombosis. A bloody clot that undermines the constitution.
Winston Churchill, British statesman
The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
British politician Aneurin Bevan on Harold Macmillan
Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P.J. O’Rourke, American writer
Tony Blair has pushed moderation to extremes.
Robert MacLennan, Scottish politician
This island is made mainly of coal and is surrounded by fish. Only an organising genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.
British politician Aneurin Bevan on the Tory Party
It was said Mr Gladstone could convince most people of most things, and himself of anything.
British clergyman Dean William R. Inge on William Gladstone
Aneurin Bevan of course was himself far from being universally admired. He even felt the betrayal of his own Labour Party exclaiming once to them: ‘Damn it all, you can’t have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver!’
Daily Express
comment on Bevan
My colleagues tell military secrets to their wives, except Asquith who tells them to other people’s wives.
Lord Kitchener (the model for the famous and oft-imitated
I Want You
poster of WWI).
We’d all like to vote for the best man but he’s never a candidate.
Kin Hubbard, American cartoonist and humorist
Winston is always expecting rabbits to come out of empty hats.
Field Marshall Lord Waveil on Winston Churchill’s handling of WWII
The Honourable Gentleman should not generate more indignation than he can conveniently contain.
Winston Churchill to an overly irate politician William Wedgwood Benn
I have a great admiration for Mussolini, who has welded a nation out of a collection of touts, blackmailers, ice-cream vendors and gangsters.
Michael Bateman, British journalist
If Max gets to Heaven he won’t last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell… after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.
Briish writer H.G. Wells on Lord Beaverbrook.
His ear is so sensitively attuned to the bugle note of history that he is often deaf to the more raucous clamour of modern life.
British Labour politician Aneurin Bevan on Winston Churchill
John Major is the only man who ran away from the circus to become an accountant.
Edward Pearce, British writer
When you have a skunk it is better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
President Lyndon B. Johnson on J. Edgar Hoover
Harold Wilson is going around the country stirring up apathy.
William Whitelaw, British politician
The best description of Margaret Thatcher I ever heard is that she’s just the sort of woman who wouldn’t give you your ball back.
Mike Harding, British comedian
Trust J. Edgar Hoover as much as you would a rattlesnake with a silencer on his rattle.
Dean Acheson. American statesman
A fool and his money are soon elected.
Will Rogers, American humorist
Rumsfeld is admired as a genius by people who find conceit alone to be evidence of genius.
Beast
magazine’s description of Donald Rumsfeld
Politics is derived from two words—poly, meaning many, and tics, meaning small, blood-sucking insects.
Chris Clayton, American writer
Ambassador,
n. A person who, having failed to secure an office from the people, is given one by the administration on the condition that he leaves the country.
Ambrose Bierce, American writer
A statesman is a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
Bob Edwards, American radio host
Nixon impeached himself. He gave us Gerald Ford as revenge.
Bella Abzug, American feminist
A year ago Gerald Ford was unknown around the country. Now he’s unknown throughout the world.
Norman Mailer, American writer
Most politicians look like people who have become human by correspondence course.
A.A. Gill, British columnist
Some Republicans are so ignorant that they wouldn’t know how to pour piss out of a boot—even if the instructions were written on the heel.
Lyndon B. Johnson, American president
One could drive a schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.
David Houston on fellow American politician William Jennings Bryan
As an intellectual he bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from books and ideas.
American writer Emmet Hughes on Dwight Eisenhower
To err is Truman.
Walter Winchell, American commentator
All political parties die at last from swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot, Scottish writer and physician
Mr Howard and his government are just Yes-men to the United States. There they are, a conga line of suckholes on the conservative side of Australian politics.
Australian politician Mark Lathamon John Howard
In Pierre Trudeau Canada has at last produced a politician worthy of assassination.
Irving Layton, Canadian poet
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule, and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H. L. Mencken, American journalist
There are two politicians drowning and you are allowed to save only one. What do you do? Read a newspaper or eat your lunch?
Mort Sahl, American comedian
If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries, fattened at the taxpayer’s expense.
American journalist H.L. Mencken on Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign
Asked if they’d have sex with President Clinton, 90 per cent of American women replied ‘Never again.’
Albert Roge, American writer
A semi-housetrained polecat.
Michael Foot on Norman Tebbit
Bill Clinton is the only politician in the world who can distract people’s attention from one sex scandal by being involved in another.