Life & Wisdom Quote by Clive James

Clive James lands this line like a perfect safety shot: polite society on the surface, a small knife in the sleeve. “Rude, but right” is doing double duty. It acknowledges the snobbery baked into the comparison (snooker reduced to a barroom punchline), then gleefully cashes in on it anyway. That pivot is classic James: intellectual mischief presented as common sense.

The phrase “chess with balls” works because it collapses two cultural worlds that like to pretend they don’t mix. Chess carries the perfume of seriousness, education, and quiet heroism. Snooker, despite its genuine intricacy, gets coded as leisure, smoke, pubs, working-class patience. By yoking them together, James exposes how status is assigned less by complexity than by context and costume. The joke isn’t that snooker is simple; it’s that we need a “chess” analogy to grant it dignity.

There’s also a sly correction embedded in the insult. Snooker really is a game of planning, positional play, traps, and psychological pressure; its drama is often in what you deny the opponent, not what you score. Calling it chess with balls is “rude” because it suggests snooker borrows its intelligence from a higher art. Calling it “right” is James refusing to sentimentalize the boundary between high culture and popular sport. He’s arguing, with a grin, that strategy doesn’t become noble only when it’s played on a board in silence.