The Wittiest 5 Minutes of Film

The wittiest 5 minutes of film occur in the movie Roxanne starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah. In this scene Steve Martin’s character has just been insulted for the size of his nose, which is abnormally large. Instead of immediately fighting his attacker, he humiliates him by suggesting twenty more creative insults that the man could have used. Camera angles and scenery are used to draw connections between this scene and the barroom brawls common in many Western films. Ostensibly the filmmakers wanted to put a modern spin on the classic scenario by having Martin’s character use his wit as a weapon in order to defend his honor and display his verbal prowess and potential as a mate. However he ultimately resorts to physical violence to get the man off his back, which downplays the role of intelligence and supports Freud’s statement that “there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies.”

Quote from "The Einstein-Freud Correspondence" at http://www.idst.vt.edu/modernworld/d/Einstein.html
Find the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWNLhptltBg