Famous insults from history
Celebrating the fine art of the funny insult
Our collections of famous insults
We’ll be regularly adding new collections so come back soon.
- Best political insultsFrom ancient Greece to the here and now, we’ve gathered 100 of the funniest political insults in history.
- Funniest Trump insultsTo find the funniest Trump insults, we’ve collected the best examples of Trump insulting people and people insulting Trump.
- Relationship insults: witty cynics on lovers, love, sex and marriage100 famous relationship insults from real people. History’s wittiest quips about lovers and exes, husbands and wives, sex and the sexes.
- Famous show business insultsThere are no insults like show business insults. Built on illusion, studied with envy and fuelled by lust, show biz is just asking for it. Prick an ego inflated to fill the screen and it bursts with a satisfying bang.
How we select your famous insults
To become famous, an insult needs that magic ingredient that makes it memorable. For the team at Famous Insults, that magic ingredient is wit.
Our site celebrates those who have raised the witty insult to its greatest heights. You’ll meet acknowledged kings and queens of mean like Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Joan Rivers and Jon Stewart, along with the one-hit wonders whose single telling blow earns them a place in the pantheon of putdown artists.
Be they funny insults by famous people, or famous insults by funny people, we’re looking for the wittiest insults in human history.
Finding the funniest insults ever
You may ask how we were able to ensure that the insults are indeed the wittiest ever. We determined that the best approach was to read out each famous insult to a demographic cross-section of test subjects, measuring the volume and duration of any resulting laughter.
However we became aware of certain procedural complications with this approach. Specifically we realised we’d need to do some work. So instead we used an alternative protocol whereby we selected the ones we found funny.
Sourcing famous insults
The insults have been scribbled down from books we’ve read and TV shows and movies we’ve watched. They’ve been pulled from other collections and unearthed on the interwebs.
We followed a similarly rigorous process to determine accuracy of quote and attribution. If posterity has decided a certain individual delivered a particular quip, who are we to argue? As Mark Twain said, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. Actually there’s no record he ever said this, but if he didn’t, he should have.
Where our research failed to nail down who said what and when, we went with the most apposite, not the most accurate, the most famous, not the first.
Our guiding principle
So the guiding principle behind this selection, and the sole purpose of this site, is that it should make you laugh. Immoderately. If, as you read, you don’t find your snorts and giggles disturbing family, friends and fellow commuters then we have failed.