The Book of Great Funny One-Liners by Frank Allen Read Free Book Online

in a damp basement.
    The best that can be said about Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
    Bill Bryson, American writer
    Joan Collins unfortunately can’t be with us tonight. She’s busy attending the birth of her next husband.
    John Parrott, British presenter
    He directed rehearsals with the airy deftness of a rheumatic deacon producing Macbeth for a church social.
    Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist
    Most of it is so slowly paced you could not only pour yourself a drink between lines of dialogue, but add ice too.
    Evening Standard on Shaft’s Big Score
    A first night audience consists of the unburied dead.
    Orson Bean, British actor
    Me no Leica.
    Critic Caroline Lejeune on I Am A Camera
    A.E. Matthews ambled his way through the play like a charming retriever who has buried a bone and can’t quite remember where.
    Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist
    Edward Woodward—his name sounds like someone farting in the bath.
    Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist
    In Hollywood, writers are only considered the first drafts of human beings.
    Frank Deford, American journalist
    My favourite comedian is Frank Carson. Over the years I have enjoyed his joke very much.
    Ken Dodd on a fellow British comedian
    He played the king as if afraid that at any moment someone would play the ace.
    American writer Eugene Field reviewing an actor’s performance
    Dear Ingrid Bergman—speaks five languages and can’t act in any of them.
    British actor John Gielgud on the Swedish-American actor
    Barrett: You don’t think that you are the only actor who can play Hamlet, do you?
    Irving: Not at all. But you are the only actor who can’t.
    American actor Wilson Barrett response to Sir Henry Irving’s questioning of his suitability to play Hamlet on the American stage.
    Some of the greatest love affairs I have known have involved one actor, unassisted.
    Wilson Mizner, American playwright
    Before television, people didn’t know what a headache looked like.
    D. Fields, American critic
    He emits an air of overwhelming vanity combined with some unspecific nastiness, like a black widow spider in heat. But nobody seems to notice. He could be reciting ‘Fox’s Book of Martyrs’ in Finnish and these people would be rolling out of their seats.
    British playwright Roger Gellert on British comedian John Cleese
    My dear chap! Good isn’t the word!
    British librettist W.S. Gilbert greeting an actor in his dressing room after a particularly bad performance.
    A script of Brideshead Revisited needs an intravenous dose of syrup of figs or just a bullet.
    A.A. Gill, British columnist
    The plays of Samuel Beckett remind me of something Sir John Betjamen might do if you filled him up with Benzedrine and then force-fed him with Guinness intravenously.
    Tom Davis, British journalist
    You always knew where you were with Sam Goldwyn. Nowhere.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald, American writer
    It’s greater than a masterpiece—why, it’s mediocre!
    Samuel Goldwyn, American film studio director
    There is less to this than meets the eye.
    American actor Tallulah Bankhead commenting on a play
    Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call girls.
    Jackie Gleason, American comedian
    Any picture in which Errol Flynn is the best actor is its own worst enemy.
    Ernest Hemingway, American writer
    He gives her class and she gives him sex.
    Katharine Hepburn on fellow American actors Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
    Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
    John Le Carré, British author
    It’s a new low for actresses when you have to wonder what’s between her ears instead of her legs.
    Katherine Hepburn on fellow American actor Sharon Stone
    Television is still in its infancy—that’s why you have to get up and change it so often.
    Michael Hynes, American journalist
    Film directors are people too short to become actors.
    Josh Greenfield,