Insult Backfire

"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 take 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:

• Villains: Calling them evil, vile, or psycho is likely to make them drop their Affably Evil act and be demure from the flattery, especially if they're of the card-carrying variety.
• Troll: Those who get off of people's retorts towards their trolling; those who had sucessfully "baited people" into insulting them. May overlap with the villainous cases above.
• Sluttiness: Many a Vamp finds her lasciviousness high praise.
• Alternative Lifestyles: Take your pick, but the person in question is happy with it.
• The Trickster: Acting shocked at their underhandedness.
• Madmen: Anyone who tells them "You're Insane!!" will be met with a response such as "Thanks for noticing!"
• Heroic: The character being insulted is proud of his idealism, honor, heroic tendencies, or some other trait the villain tries to insult.
• Artists: The disgust of the viewer for their work was the Intended Audience Reaction.
• Geeks and Nerds are often proud of their geekiness/nerdiness/useless knowledge.
• Feminine Women: The woman is a supporter of equal rights for women and sees no reason why that should stop her from displaying feminine traits.
• Someone who's been criticized a lot over something and is at the point where they brush off insults as "Wow, Never Heard That One Before." Bonus points for critiquing the insulting technique itself.
• Jerkasses: The character is an unrepentant dickwad who deliberately responds this way just to infuriate their insulters, or a Card-Carrying Jerkass who takes open pride in their assholery.
• Sarcasm-Blind: When a character takes someone else's sarcastic compliment towards them as a genuine compliment.
• Rule of Funny: The character is a complete idiot who loves hearing other people talking about them, whether positively or negatively.
• The insult was done in such a way that the target is able to turn it around with a bigger insult. For example, if someone tries to Trash Talk an opponent while using an unfair advantage in a competition (whether combat or something else) and the target is able to turn it around by insinuating or straight out saying that the individual is unable to beat them without cheating. Then again, someone like a Card-Carrying Villain could retort the retort, saying the target's soft for not being a Combat Pragmatist.
• Inversions of Hitler Ate Sugar, Damned By a Fool's Praise and/or Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: The insulter is an evil person or otherwise someone the target has a really low opinion of. If having their approval is bad and would bring shame, then having their disapproval must be good!
• Actually Pretty Funny: The target thinks the insult is a clever joke and is amused by it. This may be down to them being a good sport, or maybe (as with roasts from an Insult Comic) it really is just that funny.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: They may be talking trash about you, but hey, that means they’re talking about you.

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.

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Other examples:

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."

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

• From Magic: The Gathering, the flavor text for Agent of Masks:
  "You say that I am two-faced? Enough with the flattery. We have business to conduct.''
• In Legend of the Five Rings, the Scorpion Clan's motto is "I can swim", from their telling of the fable of the Scorpion.
• 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.
  • In the Mystara supplement Tall Tales of the Wee Folk, insulting a satyr always backfires, as that race attributes all behavior to nature 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.
• A supplement to FASA's Star Trek RPG devoted to Klingons pointed out that insults often wouldn'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 complement them on the military tradition of their line (extended family).
• 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...
• In Legends of the Wulin, Sword Bastard took his name from an epithet in the Dying Speech of a hero he killed.
• In the backstory of BattleTech, 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).

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!

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