The Put-Down

My friend was right. As much as he is a Giants fan and cannot stand a scintilla of Jets success, he was hoping the Jets would win last Saturday and advace to the next round of the playoffs. This would provide a full week of utterances from Jets coach Rex Ryan and others and be sufficient fodder for sports radio, television AND the print media that you wouldn't need reality TV. You'd have another week of reality sports, coming right at you locally, from New York.

Of course the Jets did win, they are advancing to play the New England Patriots on Sunday and all mouths are open and tongues are going. And as much as this is highly entertaining to some, it is not high quality.

For myself, I find I like the written, composed put-down that is the product of someone spinning phrases and double meanings. The fairly literary put-down.

These can be found anywhere words are written, throughout the ages. I perhaps fell in love with this variety when the high school English teacher pointed out what the opening lines of Othello were implying:

Brabanito:
Thou are a villain
Iago:
You are--a senator.

The obvious, and the implied. Great stuff.

For whatever reason, I seem to have remembered a few of these types lately.

Maureen Dowd, in one of her columns recounts the story of the film director Billy Wilder aiming his anger at the very height-challenged, very famous Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar, by declaring: "That man should go hang himself from a Bonsai tree.''

Book reviews are another source. And the slight is not always aimed at the book or the author, but is worked in there as a zinger from the reviewer.

Take Nick Schulz's book review of 'Prime Movers of Globalization,' by Vaclav Smil. It turns out the book is about diesel engines and gas turbines, and how they move the goods. Mr. Schulz works in the back-of-his-hand to Al Gore, the global warming prophet, when he says that "if the story of these remarkable machines reveals anything, it is that Mr. Gore's vision [the elimination of diesel engines by 2017--made in 1992] is utterly untethered to reality."

We get the contention.

Other types of reviews can offer goodies. Take Joanne's Kaufman's review in the WSJ of 77 year-old Joan Collins's show at Feinstein's.

Ms. Kaufman uses Joan's show as the springboard for commenting on several things, one of which is what she sees as the direction of cabaret entertainment, "becoming the public-access channel of the elder-care industry."

My favorite one however remains one I read recounted by Christopher Buckley in a New Yorker article quite a few years ago where he quoted something Dorothy Parker said about the female student body at Bennington College: "If the girls at Bennington College were laid end-to-end, I wouldn't be at all surprised."

Compile all the encountered put-downs and perhaps rank them? It's possible.

Jimmy Breslin once described a return-match gunfight (the third and final one) between Dutch Schultz and another gangster named Chink Sherman on a night club's dance floor as being won by Schultz by a wide margin.

After first place, there is no other.

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