Table Of Contents
Chapter XI - Miscellaneous Insults
If you have reached this far, you must be getting the hang of insulting. Now for the small 'extras', the tiny additions to insulting that make it all just a little bit more virtuosic and enjoyable.
i) Rhyming
No one is sure as to the origins of rhyming insults. Popular belief holds that the first rhyming insult was "Liar, liar, pants on fire." Researchers have found out that this cannot be correct, as rhyming insults were in abundant use long before the invention of the pant. As far back as ancient Rome, there are recorded uses of rhyming insults, as can be seen from the following transcript:
Peasant: "No, oh great King Augustus, I did not steal an apple from your orchard."
King Augustus: "Liar, liar, toga on fire."
(to guard): "Torch him."
In fact, even in the New Testament there are rhyming insults:
And Jesus spake thus:
'I shall not call you a servant any longer, because the servant does not know what
the master has done. I shall call you a fornicator, and if I may add, quite an ugly one.'
John, 15:1`17
ii) Poems
Two of the most famous literary persona of the Millenium past are the pioneers of the poetic insults. I am talking, of course, about Mr. William Shakespeare and Mr. Lewis Carrol. Shakespeare was at first excluded from the 'IM an SOB' (Insulting and Mental anguish Society of Britain,) until he submitted his famous Sonnet CXXX on the entry form. He was later to become the Literary Chairman of the SOB's.
An excerpt from the Sonnet:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses demask'd, both red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
Lewis Carrol was also a proud member of the 'IM an SOB', due to his deeply insulting prose and poetry. Perhaps his best-known insult is the poem 'My Fancy', written on March 15th, 1862. Here are some lines from the insulting masterpiece:
And if you were to ask me how
Her charms might be improved,
would not have them added to,
But just a few removed!
She has the bear's ethereal grace,
The bland hyena's laugh,
The footstep of the elephant,
The neck of the giraffe;
The full verse can be found in '
College Rhymes' or
here.
You may wish to write your own poem-insults. However, feel free to use already-existing poems, or to extrapolate from them, as I have done in the following pick-up-line-insult-poem (based on Bill Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII):
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
No bloody way.
You are one ugly hag.
You'll never get a shag.
Back to Chapter X - Indirect Insults . . . Forward to Chapter XII- Excerpt from the 1992 World Insulting Championship Final in Brussels
(Vassilyevich vs. White)