best insults...EVER

There are many insults in the Shakespeare canon, but none make me smile like those from Richard III. 


Of my favorites is: Dost grant me, hedgehog? (I, ii, 280)  Just think of it.  this could replace "I know you are, but what am I?" in colloquial speech, if we just start using it.


But what of the hedgehog??? Why is that such an insult?  Specifically, when Lady Anne is hurling some of the finest insults in early modern English, she is hurling them at that "..diffused infection of a man" (I, ii, 253): Richard.  Ricard's coat of arms contains a red wild Boar...which is a pig...which is hog. So reducing him from a charging boar to a porcupine (porc, taking from the Latin, porcine: pig) is degrading. More than that, it is freaking hysterical, especially if one considers what a lame hedgehog looks like: 

not to mention: 

From Monty Python's Flying Circus