The Most Brutal Insults from ‘Veep’
It’s been calculated that the HBO sitcom Veep packs an average of four jokes per minute. That’s an impressive stat, and what’s even more spectacular is that most of these jokes land and land hard. The series that follows Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her political career — as the Vice-President turned President turned yet another public figure who wrote a memoir in the U.S. — has as many political jabs as it has general insults flying between its characters.
Naturally, we took it upon ourselves to forage through the show’s vast thicket of often wildly inappropriate insults to bring you the best disses and snubs these Washington, D.C. characters spilled from their man-eating maws...
Selina Calls Gary a Car-Window Garfield
Throughout Selina’s political career, no one stays as loyal to her as her personal aide and assistant, Gary Walsh (Tony Hale). Selina usually tolerates Gary’s claustrophobic presence and obsessive admiration, most likely because he’s highly agreeable and extremely non-threatening. However, there have been times when she’s turned on her faithful employee, ripping him to shreds like a rabid Chihuahua.
Case in point, the scene below where she tells him: “Who do you think you are, Gary Antoinette? Did somebody make you First Lady? Because I don’t remember marrying you, Gary. I don’t remember fucking you in Niagara Falls. I think I’d remember that. You are unimportant. And you have suckered onto me like some sort of a car-window Garfield. You think you’re some sort of a big shot here? Oh my God, you are not a big shot, Gary. You are a middle-aged man who sanitizes my tweezers.”
The Public’ s Nicknames for Selina
Selina’s staff did warn her not to Google herself and learn about the myriad insulting nicknames the media and public have assigned her. Too bad they ended up telling her anyway. “Voldemeyer” and “The Batcave” both have our vote.
Co-Workers’ Nicknames for Jonah Ryan
There’s a strong, almost certain possibility that Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) might have had the most insults thrown at him during the show’s seven seasons. He’s the easiest target by far because not only is he the most horrid of men, but he also looks like Blanko, the blue nerdluck from Space Jam.
Warner Bros.
During a congressional hearing in Season Four, “The Jonad Files” is brought up — a document containing both a portmanteau and a string of insulting nicknames Selina’s staff used to describe the wretched D.C. worm. “Jizzie Gillispie” and “Spewbacca” are right up there with the best.
Catherine Meyer Calls Out Jonah
In the third episode, we first meet the VP’s daughter Catherine Meyer (Sarah Sutherland), when she visits her mother and attends her 20-year anniversary in D.C. Catherine soon abandons her quiet demeanor and confronts her mom and staff members about their dubious conduct regarding just about everything. At one point, Catherine calls out Jonah for the gross sexual predator he is by saying, “Are we seriously going to let the guy with the police-sketch face of a rapist tell us what to do?”
Congressman Furlong Insults Will
Roger Furlong (Dan Bakkedahl) is the U.S. Representative from Ohio and one vile, sadistic piece of human garbage. So, you know, he fits right in with the rest of the Veep characters. Furlong’s aide, Will (Nelson Franklin), has worked for him since age 15 and is usually the recipient of the congressman’s insidious verbal abuse. Furlong calls Will everything from a “fucking four-eyed failure” to “a condom filled with fire ants.” Furlong is so awful that he makes Will learn the congressman’s insults toward him and is promptly ordered to recite them in front of others at any given time, which is pretty much every time.
Congressman ‘No Jaw’
When Congressman Furlong tries to school Selina on how to give a speech, she snaps at him and calls out his literal lack of chops: “I know how to give a motherfucking speech. Don’t you patronize me with your no jaw, you Congressman No Jaw! Get the fuck out.”
Teddy Calls Out Jonah
It couldn’t be that difficult for the writers of Veep to come up with insults that Jonah absolutely, 100 percent deserves. When the Slender Man knock-off ends up marrying his step-sister (who’s actually his half-sister), Jonah refrains from telling his aides about the little detail he apparently finds nothing wrong with. When one of his aides, Teddy Sykes (Patton Oswalt), learns about it, he loses his patience and calls Jonah an “80-story sky-raper.” This, of course, from the guy who used to sexually harass Jonah by occasionally grabbing his balls, which led to Teddy undergoing a court-ordered chemical castration.
Uncle Jeff Rips into Jonah
Even Jonah’s own uncle can’t stand his existence, even though it should be noted that Uncle Jeff (Peter MacNicol) is, himself, an abomination. Uncle Jeff says a lot of despicable things whenever he opens his face socket, and in Season Six — while visiting Jonah in the hospital — he drops a dozen WTF bombs, including telling his nephew, “I am pulling this creature from the jizz lagoon (Jonah) right off the New Hampshire congressional ballot and replacing him with his cousin, Ezra. Ezra has more raw political talent in the tip of his rosy-head pecker than you have in this mangled abortion coat hanger you should be ashamed to call your body.”
Selina Disses a Fictional Iowa Town
The seventh and final season of Veep sees Selina setting out on the campaign trail and visiting a charming, fictional Iowa town called Lurlene. Or, as she so eloquently puts it, “Lurlene, even the name sounds like it’s on meth. Who in their right mind would live in this ashtray’s anus?”
Dan Tells Jonah He Looks Like an Underground Cultist
At one point during Jonah’s disastrous political career, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer and underwent six weeks of chemotherapy. Of course, the man wasn’t going to keep it private and pretended to be sick while in remission, shaving his head and eyebrows and basking in people’s sympathies. When Dan finally catches Jonah in his lie, he gives him all the grief, saying Jonah looks like he should be “underground worshipping an atomic bomb, you human fucking Pap smear.” Dan also adds that he didn’t think it possible for Jonah “to look more like a giant cock.”
Amy Tells Dan He’s a Nuclear Disaster
Amy and Dan are constantly at each other in a “will they, won’t they” sitcom situation that thankfully never goes full cliché. While Amy seems to have an entire diary dedicated to jogging down insults for Dan, the one where she tells him that “you're about as toxic as a urinal cake in Chernobyl" takes the, uh, proverbial cake.
Of course, the scene in the very first episode where Selina asks Amy what she thinks of Dan is also a ringer.
Amy Calls Out Jonah
While most other characters will go into a full-blown speech to berate and call out Jonah for being insufferable, Amy can both do it and nail it in half a dozen words: “You’re a monument to vaginal dryness.”
Jonah Calls Out Selina
We guess we had to at least include one instance where Jonah gets a good burn in. That honor surely goes to the time when, during a discussion of the VP’s approval ratings, the giant scaffolding sleazebag said, “Imagine something small has crawled up a dead cow’s ass, and that small thing actually dies itself. If that dead thing then farted out a sack of eggs, but each individual egg is a smaller, rotting dead thing. That’s how toxic she is.”
Amy’s Boyfriend Calls Out Jonah
Truly, we could make an entire list about people sticking it to the guy who said that as President of the United States, he’d ban math because it was invented by Muslims. In episode six of Season Two, Amy’s Quaker boyfriend Ed Webster (played by Zach Woods) annihilates Jonah’s character for giving him beef about his sobriety, saying, “Jonah, you’re not even a man. You’re like an early draft of a man, where they just sketched out a giant mangled skeleton, but they didn’t have time to add details like pigment or self-respect. You’re Frankenstein’s monster if his monster was made entirely of dead dicks.”
The speech could only have been better if it had lasted another three minutes.
