Ah! Those great one-liners

Those like me who were hoping that Indiana and North Carolina will rid us of Bill and brood, will have to wait a few weeks longer. The lady whose funding has all but dried up since she began to look less and less likely to beat Obama to the nomination has started to reach into her own considerable fortune, all made after the couple left the White House. Bill makes $100,000 a speech and he is always to be found standing behind a lectern. Not bad for a guy who had huge unpaid legal bills when he left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This Democratic primary refuses to end. Hillary’s people say they are going to carry it right into the party convention in August. If that turns out to be true, a large number of boredom-induced nervous breakdowns are a certainty.

What is with these politicians anyway! They say one thing, and do another. They raise their right hand to strike an enemy, who being a politician himself knows that it is not the right hand that will strike him but the left, gets into the correct defensive position and before he knows it, he has been brought to the ground by the right hand that was not supposed to hit him.

The American poet Carl Sandburg really got it right when he said, “A politician should have three hats. One for throwing in the ring; one for talking through; and one for pulling rabbits out of, if elected.” As one visiting card begets another, in the same way, one quotation produces another, and then another.

May I, for example, suggest the following to the Army as its new recruiting slogan: “Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people — and kill them.” America is the land of the great one-liner and one of the past masters of this art was Groucho Marx, who said of television when it began to grow in popularity, “I find television very educating. Every time someone turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Groucho was always brilliant and invariably funny. Once he said, “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” And on another occasion, “Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.” And then, “Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.”

It was Groucho who once sent this telegram to a club: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” The people of Kansas never forgave him after he said, “It isn’t necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.” No great admirer of soldiery, he observed on one occasion, “Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms”; and then again, “Military justice is to justice, what military music is to music.”

And on reading, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” And when someone mentioned to him a particularly striking woman, he said, “She got her looks from her father. He’s a plastic surgeon.” What he said about principles I recommend to all our political parties, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.”

However, when it comes to one-liners, the great Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn leaves all others sleeping at the post. Nobody has made the English language stand on its head like Goldwyn. Rejecting a movie deal offered to him, he said, “In two words im possible.” And on the eve of the release of one of his movies, he said, “I don’t care if it doesn’t make a nickel. I just want every man, woman and child in America to see it.”

Another time he observed, “I am willing to admit that I may not always be right, but I am never wrong.” As an intimate love scene was about to be shot, Goldwyn told the director, “Tell them to stand closer apart.” Asked once by a journalist why he had gone into the business of making movies, he replied, “If I were in this business only for the business, I wouldn’t be in this business.”

In Lahore, a movie which is a flop is called “dabba”; in Hollywood, it is called a lemon or a turkey. Of one such movie, Goldwyn said, “Go see that turkey for yourself, and see for yourself why you shouldn’t see it.” When asked about a singer whom he was said to like, he said, “Can she sing! She is practically a Florence Nightingale.” Asked about a young woman trying to make it in the movies, Goldwyn bragged, “Give me a couple of years and I’ll make that actress an overnight success.”

When one of the people who worked with him urged him to make up his mind about a project under discussion, Goldwyn replied, “True, I’ve been a long time making up my mind, but now I am giving you a definite answer. I won’t say yes and I won’t say no, but I am giving you a definite maybe.”

Goldwyn once said, “If I could drop dead right now, I’d be one of the happiest man alive.” He did not like hospitals, about which he said, “A hospital is no place to be sick.” He is also credited with the classic direction, “Include me out” and on contracts, his wisdom has not been bettered. “An verbal contract,” he observed, “isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”

Goldwyn was also a master of the mixed metaphor. Consider, “That’s the trouble with directors. Always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.” And on another occasion, “You have got to take the bull by the teeth.” Once he said, “I don’t want yes men around me. I want everyone to tell me the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.” Once while on a round of his studio, he stopped in front of a set and declared it be very dirty. When told that it was the set for a slum, Goldwyn shot back, “Well, this slum cost a lot of money. It should look better than an ordinary slum.”

When a friend told him that he had named his son after him, calling him Sam, Goldwyn replied, “Why did you do that? Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Sam.” Once when he was given something to read and asked if he had read it, he came back with, “I read part of it all the way through.” When the big screen came to cinema houses, Goldwyn observed, “A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.” And of colour television, Goldwyn, who died in 1974, said, “Colour television! Bah, I won’t believe it until I see it in black and white.”

And he truly was one who could say, “God makes stars. I just produce them.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent