Daily Dialogue — March 22, 2017

“You pompous, stuck-up, snot-nosed, English, giant-twerp, scumbag, fuck-face, dickhead asshole!”

— A Fish Called Wanda (1988), screenplay by John Cleese, story by Charles Crichton and John Cleese

The Daily Dialogue theme this week: Insult.

Trivia: In 1989, when this film was shown in the theaters in Denmark, a Danish man named Ole Bentzen, a Danish audiologist, literally laughed himself to death during the scene where Ken gets the chips up his nose. Bentzen’s heart rate went between 250–500 beats per minute and he eventually succumbed to cardiac arrest. The story behind this is that the man had made a joke a few years earlier with his family during dinner, where he put a piece of cauliflower up his and every family members nose as a joke and made a bet with them on who could eat up their carrots without the cauliflower falling out. When the scene with Ken and the chips came up, he started thinking about this dinner-incident and laughed so hard that his heart stopped. This story is well known in Scandinavia and spread around as almost an “urban legend” shortly after it happened. It was confirmed by his son, who also told the dinner-story as an explanation to why his father laughed so hard during the chips-scene that he died.

Dialogue On Dialogue: We could do a month’s worth of insult scenes in which characters string together a litany of (A) adjectives and (B) F-bombs ending with a (C) particularly offensive noun. Wanda offers a great example.