Witty Retorts Are Like Good Pork Sausage Up Your Nose

Don’t you hate being at a loss for a snappy retort when somebody just totally ticks you off? If you like, “Up your nose with a rubber hose,” try this one instead: “Up your nose with a pure pork sausage roll” (Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean!).

Sam and I might never have thought of that pork sausage retort if we hadn’t read in the newspaper that some scientists have discovered stuffing pork up a person’s nose can stop a nosebleed. I wish I’d had that retort handy the other day when a neighbor kid said “F you” to me. I had yelled at him for speeding down our little street because we have tots and bicycle riders and animals all over the place. On the other hand, for that sausage retort to make any sense I might first have needed to bloody the speeder’s nose. But that might have won me a trip to jail for assault and I hates jails. So I didn’t say anything except, “You need to slow down.”

At least I now know the young man’s IQ and most of his available vocabulary.

Getting back to the pork thing, according to an Associated Press article in The Olympian, “Dr. Sonal Sariaya and her colleagues in Michigan found that packing strips of cured pork in the nose of a child who suffers from uncontrollable, life-threatening noise bleeds can stop the hemorrhaging.”

We’re not kidding. Those scientists actually won a 2014 Nobel Prize for their discovery. The Associated Press quoted Dr. Saraiya as saying stuffing pork up a person’s nose was a treatment of “last resort” when conventional treatments failed to properly clot blood in a condition known as Glanzmann thrombasthenia. Sam and I hope so. “Excuse us, we didn’t order this rare. You want to give us trichinosis?"

So, what if you wanted to insult a Jewish person? You couldn’t say, “Up your nose with a pure pork sausage (Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean!).” I mean, they don’t even eat pork, right? And Sam and I don’t think you can make pork kosher; can you? The biggest problem with a good retort is that most of us can't think of a real juicy one until it’s too late. You find yourself in a situation that absolutely screams for a good comeback, but the words don't come to you until long after the opportunity is gone. Like Calvin once said to Hobbes: “Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I'll have a witty and blistering retort! You'll be devastated THEN!"

Meanwhile, here are some pretty good retorts you can’t go wrong with.

“Pardon me, but you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a damn.”

“I’m busy now. Can I ignore you some other time?”

“I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.”

And who can ever forget Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous word of absolute contempt: “Arsehole.” Of course you have to be able to say that with his German accent to make it really work.

It should go without saying that you want to be standing far enough away to duck a swing or to get a good head start to run away when you use a witty retort. Some people just don’t have much sense of humor.