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"What is that splattered all over the drawing?"
"Chunky spaghetti sauce!"

"The other side wants to marginalize us and make us the 'outsiders.' Why not run with it?"
Brad Lavigne, from the CBC biopic Jack

A verbal equivalent of Attack Backfire, this is for when Alice comments on a trait of Bob's in a way that's intended to sound negative — but instead of being insulted, Bob acts flattered.

Usually, this is because Bob invokes the "insulting" quality intentionally. Less commonly, Bob's The Ditz or has a poor grasp of the word or concept being insulted and takes it to be a positive comment. Other times, it's simply a case of Bob having the attitude of pretending that it's not an insult, or even turning it back on her: "Coming from you, I'll Take That as a Compliment."

A variant is for the character to be insulted, not because they dislike what was said, but because they're obviously so much worse than that.

Occasionally, the insult backfires because Alice's remarks were insulting on the surface, but Bob carries them to their logical, ultimately complimentary conclusion. These cases typically only work when the original insult was mild and/or non-malicious to begin with.

Related to Stealth Insult, but different in that an Insult Backfire is accidental and a Stealth Insult is sent over the target's head on purpose. Sometimes, it seems the only sure way to insult someone is to give them a compliment.

Not to be confused with Insult Misfire, where the target obliviously doesn't realize the insult was directed at them. Compare Threat Backfire. Compare and contrast I Take Offense to That Last One, where there are multiple insults, but the character may only object to one of them. If you phrased your insult poorly ("You fight like my grandma!"), you may get Insult Backfire through Literalist Snarking ("You fought your grandma?"). See also Blunt "Yes", which is often based on a similar theme. Contrast Compliment Backfire (and Calling Me a Logarithm, when someone thinks a word that's not an insult or even not directed at a person is an insult). See also Insult Friendly Fire.

Common variations:

See also I Take Offense to That Last One, I Resemble That Remark!, Wrong Insult Offence, Card-Carrying Villain, Tall, Dark, and Snarky and It's What I Do. If the insultee adopts the insult as an actual badge of identity, it becomes an Appropriated Appellation. Compare Geeky Turn-On, I Would Say If I Could Say, Arson, Murder, and Admiration, Blunt "Yes", and Actually Pretty Funny. Sometimes crosses paths with Misaimed Fandom. The complete opposite of Your Approval Fills Me with Shame and Offending the Fool.


Example subpages:

Other examples:

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    Advertising 
  • Evoked by the advertising for Dead Space 2 where they showed game footage to some Moral Guardians, filmed their utterly repulsed reactions and tirades of how grotesque and violent the game was, and then used this to hype the game with their "Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2" advertising campaign.
  • One Chevrolet commercial claims that their trucks are "second to nobody", before adding "If by 'nobody,' you mean Ram and Ford." Chevy apparently didn't even notice that the wording of their little extra jab at the competition meant that they were directly saying that Ram and Ford made better trucks than them. Not surprisingly, it wasn't very long before the ad was pulled.
  • Another Chevrolet truck ad from 2009 mocked the competing Ford F-150 for having a tailgate step on the back in order to present their Silverado as Rated M for Manly. In the ad, the poor sap using the tailgate step to load a bird feeder into his truck is portrayed as Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket, leading pitchman Howie Long to mock him for needing a "man step" to get items into his truck's bed. Ford truck marketing manager Doug Scott responded by thanking Chevrolet for advertising the genuinely useful feature that was available as an option on the F-150. Ford also later ran this ad in response, saying that the tailgate step was for people who actually hauled things in their trucks and implying that the only thing anybody used Chevy trucks for was carrying yarn. (And Chevy later added their own tailgate step for their trucks.)
    Doug Scott: I hope they keep running the spot because they're doing a great job advertising that feature for us. Thirty-two percent of the 2009 F-150s we’ve sold have that tailgate step. We’re doing really well with it, and we’re really happy they’re running that ad because it’s proven to be a popular feature.

    Audio Plays 
  • Big Finish Doctor Who:
    • In Tales from the Vault, after hearing Kali Korash's plan to lead the troops under his command into a massacre, Steven calls him 'psychotic'. Kali Korash takes this as a compliment.
    • In The Heart of the Battle, the Doctor says he can see the resemblance between the Taalyens and the Daleks. The Taalyen leader replies "You honour me. And yet I know that you did not intend that."

    Game Shows 
  • In Series 1 of Taskmaster after Josh Widdicombe has completed three similar tasks, "Count the baked beans in the tin", "Count the spaghetti hoops in the tin", and "Count the grains of rice in a bag", he claims Greg and Alex are bigger losers than he is because they have to watch five different people do those three things over and over, while he only had to do each once. He then gets to watch the footage of himself saying that after he's learned he was the only one doing those tasks and Greg only made him do them for a cheap laugh.
    Josh (During the task): You know, you feel like a loser, but then you realize you're not the one who has to watch this five times so I don't know who's the bigger loser, me or you.
    Greg: Do you know now?

    Jokes 
  • An old joke combines this with Analogy Backfire:
    Alice: I'd tell you a joke about your penis, but it's too short.
    Bob: You're right, that is a joke.
  • A bald man is regularly ribbed by his coworkers with various degrees of subtlety. One day, a coworker rubs the man's head and says "You know, this feels like my wife's ass!" The bald man rubs it and says "Hey yeah, it does feel like your wife's ass!"

    New Media 
  • Regular commenters on the Web site Jezebel sometimes call themselves and other members "lesbian shitasses" in response to a slur hurled at them by former actor Scott Baio's wife, who called them (and probably feminists in general) that via Twitter in a rather childish attempt to insult them.
    • A similar thing is true for commenters of Regretsy, which mocks pretentious Etsy sellers, bizarre items on Etsy, and Etsy resellers (selling bulk goods as "homemade"). One such seller called the Regretsy commenters "fat jealous losers" and the name (and the acronym FJ Ls) stuck.
    • Also true for the fighting game community, where people who only watch streams and chats (especially when it involves trolling and/or spamming) without participating in the scene proper, are referred to as "stream monsters." Said people actually embraced the term and even refer to themselves as such.

    Podcasts 
  • The Magnus Archives features an encounter between the Archivist and an incarnation of the Flesh, who looks at Martin and says, "Who's this, your boyfriend?" To which the Archivist, completely unfazed, replies, "Yes, actually."

    Radio 
  • The Goon Show regularly uses these:
    Seagoon: You are a coward.
    Bloodnock: Seagoon, you surprise me.
    Seagoon: Why?
    Bloodnock: I didn't know you knew.
    • And:
    Greenslade: Mr. Eccles, we are not doubting your sincerity for one moment. It's just your intelligence that's in question.
    Eccles: Oh... well, I accept your apology.
  • Inverted on Adventures in Odyssey:
    Connie: Why don't you live in a style more befitting your financial status?
    Whit: You're beginning to sound like Eugene.
    Connie: There's no reason to get insulting.
  • Similarly to the classic Yankee Doodle example, leftist musician Vic Berger's parody folk song made up entirely of Alex Jones quotes not only was appreciated and extensively replayed by Jones himself, but inspired multiple covers by Trump-supporting Infowars fans (among others), for a contest he devised. In the end, everybody had fun with it.

    Religion 
  • Everything the Romans did to mock and humiliate Jesus (the thorn crown, the I.N.R.I. moniker) is now standard Church imagery.
  • A Jewish myth about a Midianite god called Ba'al Peor heavily involves this trope. According to the myth, Ba'al Peor was worshipped by squatting down before his idol and defecating. A Jew who came across his temple, unaware of this practice, wanted to express his disdain of the false god by wiping his ass on the idol's nose. Instead of outraging Ba'al Peor's priests with his disrespect, they actually praised him to high heaven, remarking that "no one before has served this idol thus".

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech: In the backstory, Theodore Kurita’s contentious relationship to his father Takashi led to his father insulting him by giving him the wreckage of an old Orion BattleMech. What Theodore learned that his father did not know was that the ‘Mech was the wreckage of a ‘Mech piloted by the legendary Star League General, Alexander Kerensky. After repairing the ‘Mech, he piloted it with pride. Beyond that, Theodore was happy to receive an Orion (a 75 ton mech known for being well armed and armored) over the traditional Dragon mech that he would have otherwise received (which was 60 tons and faster than the Orion but with vastly inferior armor and firepower).
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • "Drow" is said to be a corrupted/contracted form of old elven "dhaeraow", meaning literally "black heart" and figuratively "traitor". (Call the typical drow a traitor, and she'll see it as something to be proud of.)
    • Forgotten Realms has Khôltar, where dwarves trying to insult the human metalworking settlement nicknamed it "the Place of Pourers and Filers" — inhabitant didn't see this as an insult and ran with it.
    • Mystara: In the supplement Tall Tales of the Wee Folk, insulting a satyr always backfires, as members of that race attribute their own behavior purely to natural impulses, rather than ethics or values. Call one a "filthy liar", and he'll neither take offense nor realize you're making a moral judgement, but will simply agree or disagree as to whether he's physically unclean or has told you an untruth.
  • In Nomine: Insulting Litheroy to his face is a very unsastifying experience, due to his intense literalism and seemingly inability to take offense. Depending on whether he understands what the insult means or not, the process just results in him either calmly correcting the insult to a slightly more approriate form or asking for clarification on what it means well beyond the point where something continues to be funny or hurtful. For instance, the one time he was called "Babblesnake" to his face, he replied that, since his followers are also called babblesnakes, he might be better referred to as Head Babblesnake or Archangel Babblesnake, just for clarity.
  • Legend of the Five Rings: The Scorpion Clan's motto is "I can swim", from their telling of the fable of the Scorpion.
  • Legends of the Wulin: Sword Bastard took his name from an epithet in the Dying Speech of a hero he killed.
  • Magic: The Gathering: The flavor text for Agent of Masks has the double agent in question treating being called "two-faced" as flattery.
    "You say that I am two-faced? Enough with the flattery. We have business to conduct.''
  • Star Trek: A supplement to FASA's RPG devoted to Klingons points out that insults often won't translate very well. A Federation officer trying to insult a Klingon officer by using the old "Your mother wears army boots" line would find that it would translate to "Your maternal parent wears the footgear of a soldier" which sounds to the Klingon like an attempt to compliment them on the military tradition of their line.
  • Older Than Radio: An Austrian Tarock deck from 1890 caricatured Otto von Bismarck, who betrayed and defeated Austria in the 7 Weeks War, and was recently dismissed from power at the time of its printing, as the Fool. However, the Fool happens to be the highest trump card in Tarock...

    Toys 
  • In BIONICLE, Vezon misinterprets a comment that he could "die horribly without being missed" as a compliment.

    Visual Novels 
  • In Double Homework, Dennis tells the protagonist that he can date one of his (nonexistent) sisters. The protagonist isn’t at all affected, and calls Dennis's insult a "self-own."
  • In Little Busters!, this happens twice in the same scene when Riki teases both Masato and Haruka about being bad at or late for school and both of them act like he just complimented them. He proceeds to wonder why people keep being proud of strange things lately.
  • In Umineko: When They Cry, this happens in the 8th Episode Twilight of the Golden Witch when Featherine, the Witch of Theatregoing, Drama and Spectating absolutely curbstomps Lambdadelta by stopping time, and hacking the story's script by skipping to the part where she kills her via dismemberment. Lambdadelta's dying words are calling Featherine a monster, to which she takes as a compliment.
    Featherine: A monster, she says. ...Quite a compliment, for one such as I.
  • Miu Iruma of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, due to having a BDSM kink (emphasis on the M), gets sexually aroused when insulted. The more degrading the insult the more it seems to turn her on, especially any sort of Slut-Shaming. Put her in the same room as Kokichi, a massive Troll who constantly hurls insults at everyone just to enjoy their reactions, and you might need to get a mop.
    Kokichi: Who made the locked-room mystery doesn't matter, since anyone could have done it. Don't you even understand something as basic as that, you filthy cum dumpster?
    Miu: [surprised] C-cum dumpster?! [aroused] Finally! Someone finally called me a cum dumpster!


Top

Boor, bore, or boar?

When Lord Palmerston calls out the Duke of Monmouth for the latter's blatant misogyny, Monmouth is too amused at Palmerston's choice of words to take offense. Monmouth responds to being called a pig by doing an impression of a pig and making oinking noises.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (2 votes)

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