Viva La Repartee: Clever Comebacks and Witty Retorts from History's Wits and Wordsmiths / by Mardy Grothe
Spoken, written, 'texted', behind-the-back & below-the-belt comebacks for all occasions aren't on TV (or bathroom stalls), they're dredged up from the past in Mardy Grothe's compilation of real-life repartee. Herein is a collection of the classy--and not so classy--zings, slings, daggers and punch-lines elicited from the world's most renowned wise-guys.
To be sure, there's the usual line-up of Wilde, Moliere, Churchill, Groucho and Twain; but there's also the likes of Dolly Parton, Margaret Thatcher, and Calvin Coolidge. Stylistically it's not just one-liners as various spheres of laconic interplay are featured through political, literary, and relational vignettes; displaying the circumspect universality of clever wordplay. In addition, the author splices things up with inadvertent anecdotes, puns, and oxymorons providing the necessary alternative to straight-forward banter.
While it's apparent that Grothe tries taking on a mammoth singlehandedly, failing to capture in his little book what would no doubt be a library of volumes otherwise, it's still a fair-to-middling survey of what's out there. More of a traditional approach with it's clean-even-when-risque exposition, its dry retorts are decidedly more Shakesperean in taste (i.e., "...any news today?...Not one 'new'.", p. 47) reserving more commonly parrotted rejoinders (i.e., "Cram it with walnuts, ugly!", -The Simpsons) for the playground. Despite obvious shortcomings, the book does exhibit some explanation of what real wit is, altogether in it's various forms and often unconventional settings.
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