Dave Wood

Riposte—noun, A quick, sharp return in speech or action; to reply or retaliate. ~Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

If you’re anything like me, you’d like to be a master of the riposte. You know how it works. You’re in a hot debate and after your opponent makes a strong point, you’d like to reply with a quick, sharp retaliation, but you stand there tongue-tied like some prehistoric ape unable to utter a sound. Later, as you cry yourself to sleep it comes to you: When he said THAT, I should have shot back THIS. Of course, by now it’s too late. Alas, you fall to sleep thinking of all the glorious ripostes uttered by smart folks in the annals of history.

Like my old acquaintance former U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who told a gaggle of journalists a tale from his past. “I came home from my office and my 3-year-old daughter presented me with a tablet she had scribbled with color crayons and pictures and said ‘I’ve written you a book, Daddy!’  I asked her ‘what does it say, my dear?’ and she replied ‘0h, I can write, but I can’t read.’” 

McCarthy’s riposte? “Can’t read, but can write eh?  You’ve got a good chance of becoming a Washington journalist!”

Another great riposter was young Winston Churchill. Asked to comment on his recent book about the Boer War, he replied, “Nothing in life is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” Later, when he lost his position as First Lord of the Admiralty, taking the blame for Lord Kitchener’s goof-up at Gallipoli, he mused, “Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once; in politics it’s possible to be killed many times.”

Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow replied to his opponent William Jennings Bryant, who questioned the former’s agnosticism during the Scopes Monkey Trial, “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.”

Women also get in the act. Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Longworth embroidered her riposte on a parlor pillow: “If you can’t say something nice about someone, please sit by me.”  Alice, who was married to the speaker of the house, is often characterized as the grande dame of the insult but was at least kind to one of her father’s successors, when she famously said that “President Warren Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” 

The famed Algonquin Circle contributed several classic riposters. At one Algonquin event, actress and conservative Clare Booth Luce opened the ballroom doors for an aging and very left-wing Dorothy Parker, remarking “Age before beauty,” as Parker swept past Luce into the ballroom, exclaiming “And pearls before swine! “

Parker wrote the following in her review of a young actress’s debut performance on the Broadway stage: “Last night at the Belasco Theatre, Miss Katharine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Mannish Wisconsin author Edna Ferber arrived for lunch at the storied hotel, wearing a dress. “My goodness Edna,” commented the effeminate Alexander Woolcott, “you look almost like a woman”, to which Ferber replied “And you, Alec, look almost like a man.”

What’s not to envy?