I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

by Mardy Grothe

  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-sev
en 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.”

  College: a fountain of knowledge where all go to drink.

  HENNY YOUNGMAN

  chapter 4

  The Lights May Be on, but Nobody’s Home

  On March 7, 1850, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts rose from his seat in the Senate to make what he thought would be the speech of his career. He talked for three and a half hours in support of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay’s “Compromise of 1850,” arguing that it was pointless to oppose slavery in the Southern states, or even to argue against its extension into the new territories in the American Southwest. Webster took the view that plantation owners were entitled to safeguard their property, and even went so far as to advocate a rigorous enforcement of the recently passed fugitive slave statutes.

  News of the speech was quickly telegraphed back to Massachusetts, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Most people in the region were stunned, leading one commentator to say—metaphorically—that the speech had slammed into New England with the fury of a hurricane. Many Bay State luminaries made impassioned attacks on Webster. Horace Mann called the speech “a vile catastrophe.” John Quincy Adams described “the gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition, and the rotten heart of Daniel Webster.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous New Englander of the time, wrote:

  The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster

  sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

  After Emerson shared the analogy with a few friends, it quickly began to be whispered throughout New England. As often happens, the quotation got simplified as it was passed along, and most people were just as likely to hear it this way:

  The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster

  is like the word love in the mouth of a whore.

  The impact was dramatic. With his political base in shambles, Webster resigned three months later. Almost immediately, historians began to refer to “the speech that lost a Senate seat.” What they generally fail to mention, however, is the role that a few critical and insulting remarks—and one spectacular anaogy—played in the process.

  Disparaging remarks are such a staple of life that we hear them every day without recognizing that so many of them are metaphorical. As a child, I routinely heard people question the sanity of others by saying things like he’s got a screw loose or she has bats in the belfry. And over the years an entire class of idiomatic expressions—all metaphorical—have been created to describe a deficiency of intelligence:

  He doesn’t have all his marbles.

  She’s not playing with a full deck.

  He’s one brick short of a load.

  She’s a few grapes short of a bunch.

  The elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top.

  The stairs don’t go all the way up to the attic.

  The lights are on, but there’s nobody home.

  The political arena has been filled with memorable metaphorical insults. In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt, a thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary of the Navy, was itching for the United States to rid the Western hemisphere of European colonialism, particularly Spain’s involvement in Cuba. The hawkish Roosevelt believed a powerful show of force was required, but President William McKinley favored a diplomatic approach to the problem. In a rare display of candor from a junior official in any presidential administration, Roosevelt said of McKinley:

  He shows all the backbone of a chocolate éclair.

  In April 1898, shortly after the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor, Congress declared war on Spain. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Roosevelt, who quickly resigned his post and eagerly volunteered for action. Within weeks, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt transformed a collection of college athletes, cowboys, policemen, and miners into a fighting group that went on to achieve lasting glory as the Rough Riders. Roosevelt was lionized in the American press, and his status as a war hero guaranteed a successful political future. In 1900, despite his many qualms about McKinley, Roosevelt was persuaded to become the vice-presidential running mate. They won the election, of course, and after McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Roosevelt became the twenty-sixth president of the United States, the youngest man, at age forty-two, to serve in the office.

  As president, Roosevelt continued to use metaphors about backbone and spine, believing they were great shorthand terms for courage (or the lack of it). In another example, he said of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:

  I could carve out of a banana

  a justice with more backbone than that.

  The theatrical and entertainment world is filled with magnificent metaphorical insults. Many come from critics, whose reviews have contained some real gems:

  She was good at playing abstracted confusion

  in the same way a midget is good at being short.

  CLIVE JAMES, on Marilyn Monroe

  He played the King as though under the momentary apprehension

  that someone else was about to play the Ace.

  EUGENE FIELD, reviewing Creston Clarke as King Lear

  Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.

  RALPH NOVAK, on Yoko Ono

  Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else’s dirty water.

  ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT, on Marcel Proust

  Sometimes the recipients of reviews have fired back in similar ways, as when the American playwright David Mamet described two influential critics this way:

  Frank Rich and John Simon are

  the syphilis and gonorrhea of the theater.

  Metaphorical insults are generally directed at people, but every now and then, we come across examples of what might be called impersonal invective:

  Like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.

  THOMAS BEECHAM, on the harpsichord

  A war between architecture and painting

  in which both come out badly maimed.

  JOHN CANADY, on the Guggenheim Museum

  A monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.

  PRINCE CHARLES, on a proposed addition to London’s National Gallery

  Analogies and metaphors can be used to deliver compliments as well as insults. Garrison Keillor once said that Alfred Kinsey was to sex what Columbus was to geography. In his 2001 Jazz documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns said of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong:

  Armstrong is to music what Einstein is to physics

  and the Wright Brothers are to travel.

  And Nunnally Johnson offered this tribute to Marilyn Monroe:

  She is a phenomenon of nature,

  like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon.

  You can’t talk to it. It can’t talk to you.

  All you can do is stand back and be awed by it.

  Sometimes the compliments have a double-edged quality, as when John Mason Brown said of Dorothy Parker:

  To those she did not like, she was a stiletto made of sugar.

  More metaphorical compliments can be found in other chapters of the book, but in the remainder of this chapter you will find only examples of words being used as weapons—and all will be expressed metaphorically.

  A beautiful palace without central heating.

  ANONYMOUS, on Clare Booth Luce

  According to Luce’s biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris, this was a popular saying about Luce. If you know a great beauty—or a handsome man—who lacks warmth and sensitivity, you won’t find a better metaphorical insult.


  A one-man slum.

  ANONYMOUS, on Heywood Broun

  Broun was a rotund man who was notorious for his disheveled appearance. He was once described this way, and it followed him for the rest of his life.

  The glittering structure of her cultivation sits on her novels

  like a rather showy icing that detracts from the cake beneath.

  LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS, on Edith Wharton

  America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

  FRÉDÉRIC-AUGUSTE BARTHOLDI

  Bartholdi was a nineteenth-century French sculptor who loved America but was turned off by its citizens’ disgusting personal habits, especially tobacco chewing. His most famous work, a statue he titled Liberty Enlightening the World, was a mouthful for everyday Americans, who since 1886 have informally referred to it by the name it has today: the Statue of Liberty. Another European aesthete who loved Americans but detested tobacco chewing—and the spitting associated with it—was Oscar Wilde. The practice inspired his famous metaphorical remark, “America is one long expectoration.”

  His mind had one compartment for right and one for wrong,

  but no middle chamber where the two could commingle.

  HOWARD K. BEALE, on Andrew Jackson

  This is an extaordinary description of a black-and-white thinker by a respected twentieth-century historian who wrote insightfully about many American leaders. Jackson, like so many either-or thinkers, was also stubborn—a characteristic also captured by Beale: “He could bear insult, personal danger, obloquy; but he could not yield his point.”

  Her singing reminds me of a cart coming downhill with the brake on.

  THOMAS BEECHAM, on an unidentified soprano in Die Walkyre

  She has a face that belongs to the sea and the wind,

  with large rocking-horse nostrils,

  and teeth that you just know bite an apple every day.