People Say the Darndest Things…About Dentists

On my blog rkirkhuntsman.com, I wrote: Working in the dental industry, I’ve heard just about every story and anecdote that you can imagine about dentists and teeth. 

Now, here are great tidbits from some super-famous and not-as-famous folks who also have a lot to say on those topics.

I didn’t want to be an actress. I wanted to be a dentist, but you never know what life will bring you.

-Sofia Vergara, award-winning actress, comedian and businesswoman

Now, most dentist’s chairs go up and down, don’t they? The one I was in went back and forwards. I thought ‘This is unusual’. And the dentist said to me ‘Mr Vine, get out of the filing cabinet.

–Tim Vine, English writer, actor, and comedian

If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist’s office would be full of luminous ideas.

-Mason Cooley, American aphorist

Happiness is your dentist telling you it won’t hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.

-Johnny Carson, comedian and television host of The Tonight Show for 30 years

I told my dentist my teeth are going yellow. He told me to wear a brown tie.

-Rodney Dangerfield, stand-up comedian and actor

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist’s drill.

-Leonard Woolf, British writer and husband of author Virginia Woolf

I am lucky: I have fantastic doctors and a fantastic dentist.

-Anna Deavere Smith, actress, playwright, and professor 

Faced with the choice of enduring a bad toothache or going to the dentist, we generally tried to ride out the bad tooth.

-Joseph Barbera, animator, director, and cofounder of Hanna-Barbera

I intend to be flesh and blood, not airy philosophy, for there has never yet been a philosopher who could endure a toothache patiently, even though they all write as if they had risen above human suffering and misfortune.

-William Shakespeare writing for the character of Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing

Dentist: a prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coin out of your pocket.

–Ambrose Bierce, journalist, poet, and short story writer.

Some tortures are physical

And some are mental,

But the one that is both

Is dental.

-Ogden Nash, American poet

We do have a zeal for laughter in most situations, give or take a dentist.

-Joseph Heller, short story writer and playwright