Sarcasmus

Sarcasmus (sar’kaz’-mus): Use of mockery, verbal taunts, or bitter irony.

Your brain isn’t the size of a pea, because you don’t have a bran. Where’d you get those shorts? A dumpster or off a crack den floor? Your mother looks dead. Is that a nose or a mountain? Who taught you how to write? A blender? What’s that smell? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you standing there. Your dog looks like a rag with legs. Your hair is abandoning your head. What’s it scared of? Are those your shoes or x-country skis? If you get any fatter you’ll turn into a hippo.

I have no friends. I live alone. Nobody has ever loved me, not even my mother—she just gave me the basics: food, shelter, and clothing. I’ve never loved anybody either. I came close with a deaf girl until she learned to read lips. I can’t stop insulting people. My first word as a child was “asshole.” I said it to my Sunday School teacher. She screamed and I was driven home with a strip of masking tape over my mouth. I tore it off as soon as I got out of the car, and calmly said “asshole.” The driver said: “Have fun dancing in Hell with Satan you little imp!” I said “asshole” again over my shoulder as I walked up the sidewalk to my front door. My mother was waiting. She dragged me in the door by my ear. I was wearing short pants and she went into the kitchen, grabbed a meat tenderizing hammer and whacked my naked legs. It hurt, but all I could think of was developing a longer list of insults. I was nine years old.

By the time I was a teenager I had 100s of insults. I dreamt in insults. I learned how to target my insults toward people who were literally weak and wouldn’t fight back: 98-pound weaklings, elderly people, chronically ill people, fat tubs of lard, amputees, and people wearing casts. It was an insult playground. A non-stop source of delight and causing undeserved pain. I said to a guy in a cast:” It looks like you’ve been cast as bumbling idiot”; to a guy with asthma: “Why don’t you take a breather numb nuts?”

Then, one day I realized I was sick—mentally sick.. It happened when I told a little girl wearing leg braces that she looked like she had robot legs. Her mother angrily asked: “What the hell is wrong with you?” I sad: “People like you, you bleach blond bozo.” Meanwhile, the little girl was sobbing so she could hardly breathe. I ran away.

I hid out in my house for two days, resolving to do something about my insult fixation. I saw Don Rickles on TV. He made mountains of money insulting people. So, I toned down my insults and started appearing in pubs and in small clubs. I insulted my audience members—all in “good fun.” My manager got me a permanent gig in Las Vegas, and I’ve been there ever since. Now I’m wealthy enough to let my hair down and insult the hell out of a cadre of “absorbers”; a group of people who I insult and pay quite well for “taking it.” Sometimes, I put on a disguise and hit the streets for a day of insulting people. Last week I insulted Cher and she tasered me. I had said to her “What, are those boobs or tennis balls in a bag?”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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