The Angry Island Quotes

“The definition of wit is a joke that doesn't make you laugh.”
― A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English

“The only type of humor that is excused lower classness is satire, and satire is the chamber music of comedy - a joke that many people profess to enjoy, but few actually get.”
― A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English

“There was a powerful and effulgent smell of industrial disinfectant. It's a smell that never reassures you about cleanliness; rather, it makes you doubly squeamish of lurking vileness. Soap smells clean, disinfectant smells dirty. Funny that.”
― A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English

“The purpose of an army must surely be to put itself out of business.”
― A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English

“Accent is the last great redoubt of prejudice. The race relations industry, that inquisition of fairness and sensitivity, doesn't protect against discrimination by funny voice. You can mock an accent with impunity, and everyone does”
― A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English

“It must be said that almost all primitive people think themselves divinely wrought, singled out and special. Often their names translate simply as "the people" or, like the San bushmen of the Kalahari, the first people. But this is a symptom of primitiveness; attempting to prove divine biology in the nineteenth century is the anthropological equivalent of a society regressing to sleeping with the lights on.”
― A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English