Lakai
December 9, 2006, 11:17pm
#1
The 25 Funniest Analogies (Collected by High School English Teachers)
To spare you from clicking:
Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever
garygnu
December 9, 2006, 11:28pm
#3
These kids are sharp.
Those are as hysterical as that woman who played Lambert in ‘Alien’ was when the steamy head of an alien emerged tentatively from John Hurt’s stomach and peered out at everybody during a meal of what appeared to be coleslaw and something else.
As someone who’s had this pointed out to them many times, aren’t most of those actually similes?
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
This one reminded me of what a Bulwer-Lytton entry might be like if Bulwer-Lytton entries didn’t have to be so long, rambling, and kitchen-sinky, as the unwritten rules require, while still being, as the written rules require, one sentence.
#9 Strikes me as a poor reference to Douglas Adams, but maybe I’m remembering incorrectly…
There’s a small part of me that hopes these are fake.
There’s a large part of me that know’s they aren’t.
Is #3 a “Deep Thought” by Jack Handey? I think I’ve heard it before.
Cisco
December 10, 2006, 12:19am
#10
This list has been going around forever (Bob Dole was running for president the last time your average high school student knew who Nancy Kerrigan was), and I’ve always wondered if they’re real or not. Some of them seem like rip-offs or homages (#9 ), and some of them seem like they would almost had to have been written by an adult (#8 ), but mostly they’re just so damn clever that I’d love to meet the high school kids who wrote them, if indeed they did.
It’s the description of the Vogons at the beginning of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, isn’t it?
No. 20 sounds like Blackadder to me.
Found my copy - it’s in Chapter 3:
The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
I could swear this line was used by Leslie Nielsen in Police Squad , or one of the *Naked Gun * movies. And if it wasn’t, it should have been!
He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
I could see this one actually working in one of those detective movies where the detective character is also the narrator.
For my money, you can’t beat Woody Allen’s “her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in yak.”
Although the other day I did describe Internet Explorer as “going down like a boy band in a leather bar.”
#20 was Pulitzer material, in my book.
These are mostly taken from the Style Invitational contest in The Washington Post in 1995:
http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/analogy.html
The Style Invitational contest winners and honorable mentions pass around a lot on the Internet without getting credit. This is too bad, since they are under copyright. In any case, these analogies were not written by children. They are written by adults deliberately trying for bad analogies.
glee
December 10, 2006, 6:05pm
#19
As a teacher, this is my favourite:
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
It demonstrates a correct use of an apostophre!
jjimm
December 10, 2006, 6:09pm
#20
Similarly, the other day I informed our IT guy that the network was going up and down faster than a whore’s knickers when the navy’s in town.
