Daily Inspiration Quote by Vincent Canby

A line like this doesn’t just pan a work; it performs the pan with a little vaudeville snap. Vincent Canby’s “guaranteed to put all teeth on edge” takes a familiar idiom for irritation and makes it tactile, almost audible: you can feel the cringe in your molars. Then he spikes it with the punchline, dragging George Washington’s teeth into the blast radius “wherever they might be.” The joke is both macabre and impeccably American, because Washington’s famously problematic dentures have become a folk detail we collectively recognize as shorthand for the Founding Father’s physical reality under the marble myth.

Canby’s intent is to make disgust memorable. “Guaranteed” mimics advertising language, a sly way of accusing the offending film or performance of selling itself with confidence it doesn’t deserve. The hyperbole isn’t sloppy; it’s calibrated. By invoking Washington, Canby doesn’t merely say the thing is annoying. He implies it’s an affront to civic taste, to the idea of national dignity we pretend to inherit. It’s criticism as cultural gossip: if even the dead symbol of American virtue is involuntarily wincing, you, reader, are permitted to recoil without guilt.

The subtext is where Canby’s era of mainstream criticism shines. In a crowded media landscape, the critic’s authority comes less from solemn pronouncements than from a voice you can recognize in a single sentence. This one moves fast, lands hard, and leaves a residue: the work isn’t just bad, it’s historically, almost cosmically, embarrassing.