Striking back with vengance

Striking back with a vengeance

C’mere ‘til I tell ya

“It begins,” Holt suggests, “with a ponderous generality, which, willy-nilly, furnishes the setup. Then comes the punchline, which slays that generality the way David slew Goliath.”

By way of illustration, he recalls the time JL Austin from Oxford University was giving a lecture in New York on the philosophy of language.

“In some languages,” Austin observed, “a double negative yields an affirmative. In other languages, a double negative yields a more emphatic negative. Yet, curiously enough, I know of no language, either natural or artificial, in which a double affirmative yields a negative.” Suddenly, from the back of the hall, a man named Sidney Morgenbesser commented in a round Brooklyn accent: “Yeah, yeah.”

Holt concludes the article with an even more succinct retort made by Oscar Wilde to a now-forgotten minor poet, Sir Lewis Morris. It was the 1890s, just after the death of Lord Tennyson, and Morris was complaining to Wilde that his claims to succeed Tennyson as poet laureate were being neglected: “It’s a complete conspiracy of silence against me,” Morris said, “a conspiracy of silence! What ought I to do, Oscar?” Wilde replied: “Join it.”

Another Irishman with a talent for put-downs is Moss Keane, who displayed quick wit after playing rugby for a Welsh invitation side in the south of France. A major fight broke out during the game and everybody waded in, trading punches.

Everybody, that is, except for Keane, who stood passively, arms folded. This shocked the Welsh number two, who idolised the Kerryman. Later that night, fortified with several glasses of red wine, the young man struck up the courage to approach his hero.

“Moss,” he said, “I’ve heard of your reputation as the hard man of Irish rugby. How come you didn’t stand and fight today?”

“Look here,” replied Keane. “Whatever chance there is of me dying for Ireland, there’s no f***ing way I am going to die for Wales.”

But devastating responses don’t always come in the form of one-liners. While he was leader of the Canadian Alliance party, Stockwell Day said that he would support putting any proposal which had the support of three per cent of the electorate to a referendum. The government, then led by Jean Chrétien, was less than impressed by this idea, fearing that it would lead to all manner of ridiculous changes.

Comedian Rick Mercer had misgivings too, and decided to prove how easy it would be for ‘any idiot’ to trigger a referendum. On the TV programme ‘This Hour Has 22 Minutes’ Mercer asked the people of Canada to support a referendum in which people would vote on whether Stockwell Day should change his first name to Doris.

More than three per cent of the population responded, and the proposal never saw the light of day.