The art of the witty riposte

One hundred or so years ago, a down-in-the-dumps Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig: ‘The barbarians have taken over.’ Later on, Zweig committed suicide and Roth drank himself to death. They were both talented writers depressed about the state of the world. Reading their correspondence last week I had to laugh. Neither Roth nor Zweig had experienced Hollywood, and obviously would have died much earlier if they had done so. Which brings me to what everyone is still talking about, how a trained seal smacked another seal half its size during the Academy Awards. It was done in order to protect his wife from the barbs of the smaller one, although in my experience, whenever someone is that savagely protective of his woman, it is more often than not because he has such a slender hold on her.

It’s also Hollywood at its best. One kicks downwards and bootlicks upwards. And what did we really expect? The deep bow that Talleyrand gave to Napoleon after the emperor angrily called his foreign secretary ‘a shit in a silk stocking’? That would have been a bit out of character for the likes of Will Smith.