Similes That Make Us Smile

First, from the Irish poet and novelist George McWhirter, a simile about similes:

A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses: one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.

Less eloquently, we define simile as a "comparison (usually formed with 'like' or 'as') between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common." And today, in the seasonal spirit of giving and good cheer, I offer a dozen disparate similes that make me smile--make me smile like a jack-o'-lantern, like a holy-day, like a chain saw, like a Czechoslovakian novel, like a man advertising toothpaste, like the warm and gentle Samian sun.

• Some dance critic, who worked behind the bar in a honky-tonk, said that when Boomer danced he looked like a monkey on roller skates juggling razor blades in a hurricane.
  (Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990)



• Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
  (Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940)



• The top [of the car] was down and I listened to the hiss of the wheels against the street, the flow of wind over the car, the sound of Stan Getz blowing faintly from the speakers and trailing out into the air behind us like a pearly strand of bubbles from a pipe.
  (Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys, 1995)



• Occasionally Ichiro speaks to one Japanese writer--the pool reporter, Keizo Konishi of the Kyodo News--but only if that writer adheres to strict protocol. The gaggle of Japanese reporters submits their questions to Konishi and then gather together in the corner of the clubhouse and watch breathlessly as, 30 feet away, Konishi timidly loiters near Ichiro, who faces into his locker. . . .
  
  After three or four minutes Konishi rises, bows slightly and trudges back to the huddled mass, bearing no fruit. "Ichiro says, 'This is not the time to think of that,'" he reports, and 46 faces fall like soufflés at a bass drum recital.
  (Rick Reilly, "Itching for Ichiro," Sports Illustrated, September 12, 2001)



• The unwonted lines which momentary passion had ruled in Mr. Pickwick's clear and open brow, gradually melted away, as his young friend spoke, like the marks of a black-lead pencil beneath the softening influence of india rubber.
  (Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, 1837)



• The harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.
  (Sir Thomas Beecham)



• The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
  (Peter De Vries)



• It was just about that time that the sun
  came crawling yellow out of a manhole
  at the foot of 23rd Street,
  and a Dracula moon in a black disguise
  was making its way back to its
  pre-paid room at the St. Moritz Hotel.
  And the El train came tumbling
  across the trestles and it sounded
  like the ghost of Gene Krupa
  with an overhead cam and glasspacks
  and the whispering brushes of wet radials
  on a wet pavement, and there's a
  traffic jam session on Belmont tonight
  and the rhapsody of the pending evening.
  (Tom Waits, "Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street)," Nighthawks at the Diner, 1975)



• Orion [Twain's brother] is as happy as a martyr when the fire won't burn.
  (Mark Twain, letter to his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, 1872)



• Finally, Hillary [Clinton] swept in and moved down a line of huggers toward a raised platform centered in the room. Her positioning meant that she had to keep turning in order to hug back. Around and around and around she turned, 360 degrees, like a jewel-box ballerina whose battery has run low.
  (Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, December 2007)



• Aunt Dahlia's face grew darker. Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient's complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative's map tended a little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.
  (P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves, 1934)



• Now that I've got my lovely fire, I'm as happy as a Frenchman who's just invented a pair of self-removing trousers.
  (Rowan Atkinson as Black Adder)

Admittedly, not one of these figurative comparisons fully satisfies Dr. Johnson's criteria for the "perfect simile"--which "must both illustrate and ennoble the subject; must show it to the understanding in a clearer view and display it to the fancy with greater dignity." And perhaps that's why I find them enjoyable.

Would you care to pass along a simile that makes you smile? If so, just click on the "comments" button below.

More About Metaphors and Similes:

• Using Similes and Metaphors to Enrich Our Writing
• "House" Calls: The Metaphors of Dr. Gregory House
• A Time for Metaphors