Putdowns & Insulting Metaphors, Analogies and Similes

Sorry, but I can hear your punchlines coming as clearly as I can see your patches of acne.

She looks as though she got dressed in front of an aeroplane propeller.

When you tell him a problem, it's like making a phone call and only getting the answer machine.

Her colour contrast of make-up and fake-tan would be shocking even on an aquarium fish.

After a meeting with Reg you felt disorientated, like someone who's been asleep for far too long during the day.

After talking to him you are no wiser, like when learning to play the bagpipes, they sound exactly the same when you have finished learning them as when you started.

You have a face for radio, a voice for mime and a body you could grow tomatoes off.

Salvadore over-pronounces his words as though expecting banners to be displayed for their inauguration.

Reg was the department pencil-monitor, perched in the corner cubicle, between the bookends of fuddy and duddy.

He flaunted his out-of-date contacts like an inflated bouffant of 1980s big hair.

He finds keeping a secret as easy as holding his breath.

A window of opportunity for him usually involves a brick.

If he was a plant, he would be the carnivorous type, as he never sees a belt without the instinct to hit below it.

Never was ability so much below mediocrity so well rewarded; no, not even when Caligula's horse was made a consul.

He thinks by infection and catches an opinion like a cold.

Your mouth is writing cheques your body can’t cash.

He has the charisma of a magnum of chloroform.

He shows all the backbone of a chocolate éclair.

Reasoning with him made as much difference as trying to cool boiling lava flow with a damp flannel.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Virginia Woolf

He's like a dripping tap: you hear him but can't turn him off.

His personality is like an extract sulphur-pit giving off the smell of rotten eggs.

He reminds me of dead fish before it's had time to stiffen.

Sporting earrings too garish for any festive tree.

A weak-minded fellow I am afraid, and, like the feather pillow bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.

Earl Haig

He is like a fifty-pence piece: double-faced, many-sided and not worth a great deal.

At Ascot, her hat looked like it had made a forced landing on her head.

The management didn't just panic: they flapped like embarrassing underwear on a windy washing line.

That dress fits her like a glove — shame it doesn't fit her like a dress.

You couldn’t hit hard enough to wake your grandmother out of a light doze.

Getting off the phone from Jacqui was as easy as ripping an Elastoplast off a hairy thigh.

Afflicted with incontinent self-expression.

The conversational equivalent of a Jackson Pollock.

He is so narrow-minded he can see through a keyhole with both eyes.

He looks endearing, as if wearing a ball gown or a King Kong suit.

He looks like a lizard on a rock — alive, but looking dead.

He has splendid abilities, but is utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.

Gilbert is such a baby: he's still crying from when the midwife tapped the soles of his feet.

Usually, my latest enthusiasms are ossified by Robin's monochrome comments.

He looked terribly excited — about as excited as a mortician at a cheap funeral.

About as modest as Mussolini.

Ronnie has more issues than National Geographic.

His only tool is a hammer so he sees every problem as a nail.

If you stand close to him you can hear the ocean.

Does he have a family of four living up his nose? Is that why he sounds like a cross between someone who's sniffed a helium balloon and the paint salesman trying to summon assistance over the PA in B&Q?

A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.

You have as much talent for disguise as a giraffe with dark glasses trying to get into a polar-bear-only golf club.

The lad's voice oscillated from a low to a high register and back again like the sound of a police siren being fed through Motörhead's stage speakers at full volume as they overload.

There are more people allergic to Tom than pollen.

Your jacket would look better on a potato.

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.

Jonathan Swift

Caroline is an aficionado with a revolving door on her bedroom: while one is going out, another is coming in.

He wallows in corruption like a rhinoceros in an African pool.

Wearing that top might have been correct once, like it was once considered correct to drink tea from a saucer.

Lucy's date was pleasant enough, but she realised if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as the 'Second Tall Man'.

One could drive a schooner through any part of this argument and never scrape a fact.

Prescott could donate his face to science fiction.

He remains the exquisite showman minus the show.

That man's voice and personality is made of the essence of sleeping draught.

He's as sour as milk that's been left out in the sun all week.

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked like they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.

Oscar Wilde

Such a pompous speech ought to have been introduced with the blowing of long trumpets.

A bloke, who if you're drowning twenty feet from the shore, throws you a fifteen-foot rope.

That ogre's table manners gives vultures a bad name.

I assume Brendan's method of dressing is to smear his body with glue, then jump in and out of his wardrobe.