From Freudian slips to Stalinesque power grabs: the fine art of the Succession insult

At the end of the first episode of Succession’s new season, Logan is trying to reason with his deserter son Kendall via Kendall’s assistant Jess, who speaks to Logan over the phone while sat in the back of a car with Kendall. It begins like almost every exchange between two Roys: a tart and controlled verbal sparring match. But then, unusually for the Roys, it becomes absurd.

“He says he’s going to grind your bones to make his f__ing bread,” relays Jess nervously, as Kendall looks startled.

“Well tell him, I’m gonna…” His jaw slackens slightly, and his eyes dart around. “Run up off the, uh, f__ing beanstalk.”

“Logan’s laughing,” Jess says. “But not nice laughing.”

Since the series began in 2018, Succession has been home to some of the most brilliant and inventive insults on TV. In this particular exchange between Logan and Kendall, you can almost see the show’s creator Jesse Armstrong winking from behind the script, seeing just how far his characters can go.

Armstrong has been trading in creative insults for the best for nearly two decades now, working on both Peep Show and The Thick of It. That particularly abrasive strand of British sitcom found its way into the American mainstream firstly via Veep, and then via Succession. It’s no coincidence that the Roy brood, with their Scottish father and English mother, absorbed some of their parents’ more agricultural Britishisms.

“From the beginning I think Jesse took the view that the kids are quite international due to being incredibly wealthy, and they had lived in England for a while,” writer Tony Roche told the Guardian recently. “One of the things that is maybe unusual about the show is that it’s got this Britishness in its tone. It’s quite irreverent towards its subject, it doesn’t respect its betters.”

This particular tone is also influenced by the writer’s room, which is a lot more British than most big American shows – five of the 10 writers are Brits – and Armstrong leads the charge from near his home in South London. He and the writing team wrote the first two seasons in a converted department store close to Brixton Tube station, before moving to a space near to Victoria station for season three. The writers’ space is slightly chaotic. Notes are plastered everywhere. With no clock or thermostat in there, Armstrong drew one of each on the wall in pen.

There’s a clear central principle to how insults are constructed and deployed on Succession. They can’t just be funny. Insults, Armstrong told the New Yorker recently, “should be at least as expressive of who the character uttering it is as it is eloquent, or ineloquent, about its target”.

Even if an insult is an absolute belter, it’s liable to get cut if it unbalances a scene or doesn’t chime exactly with what a character is trying to wheedle out of a situation.

“If it’s just a little bit – half an inch – too far-leaning into something, he’s going to catch it,” Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, told the New Yorker. “On any other show, people would be, like, ‘Oh, that’s funny, let’s do that.’ And he’ll always be the voice of reason: ‘Yes, it’s funny, yes, it’s great, but it doesn’t work’.”

While not known for his zingers, Joseph Stalin is a big influence on the way that Succession’s characters use their loaded insults. Along with the writing team, Armstrong absorbs dozens of histories, novels and biographies before the scripts are put together. One outlined a particular favourite pastime of the Soviet leader.

“He would do these dinner parties where he would encourage everyone to get drunk, but he wouldn’t drink,” Armstrong told the Guardian. “Then he would make horrible jokes to Molotov or whoever about their potential torture or the murder of their colleagues.”

This is the other level that the insults of Succession work on. While nobody in the Roy family has sent their opponents to the gulag or caused a famine – though it may just be a matter of time – they do take after Stalin in their cynical detonation of jokes and insults. There is a motive behind every line.

Who gets insulted and how matters in Succession. The Roys shove at each other to take ground or snatch it back, to keep one another at arm’s length or bring a conspirator along with them – see Shiv and Roman’s slightly trepidatious mockery of their beleaguered dad in the airport lounge during the season three opener. “Those siblings have spoken to each other like that their entire lives,” Culkin said recently. “They’ve developed their own language, this almost sing-song exchange of insults.”

A common theme to the siblings’ relentless sparring is the dark Freudian undertones. Whether Roman is telling slimy financier Stewy he looks “like a dildo dipped in beard trimmings” or Kendall is telling the head of new media upstart Vaulter that he intends to lock him in a golden cage “and f__ [him] with a silver dildo,” they lean towards what Malcolm Tucker once referred to as “violent sexual imagery”. It’s even more intense between the two of them. Roman calls Kendall “a f__ing neutered hound dog” and “a sex robot for dad to f__k”.

To Roman and Kendall, their status in the company is bound up with their manliness (remember Roman pleasuring himself while looking down on the New York skyline, from atop his glass office?). They approach business like sex and sex like business, and neither provides them any real satisfaction. This masculine dysfunction is then manipulated by Shiv, who becomes particularly cruel in tearing into Roman’s sexual perversions as their sibling rivalry is replaced by more serious professional rivalry throughout the new season.

In fact Shiv’s tendency to think of herself as being intellectually and morally superior to her family and to bristle when she doesn’t get exactly what she wants – see the realisation that she’d lost star lawyer Lisa Arthur in the season three opener – can lead her to earnest and revealing outbursts. One directed at Kendall could equally apply to her: “You lack killer instinct, you’re wet, you’re green, you’re intellectually insecure, you’re not emotionally strong enough…”

For people outside of the family with an eye on climbing up the business, throwing insults around is a shortcut to sounding and feeling like a Roy. Take Tom Wambsgans, Waystar-Royco’s panicky, put-upon head of news and walking advert for no-fault divorces. He’s wealthy and well-heeled, but he’s also gauche compared to the Roys, and his insecurities about the tiny discrepancies in his tastes and theirs come through in his insults.

Much like his gigantic puffer gilet, they’re generally just a bit too shiny and overstuffed to be really convincing. There’s a slight brittleness to Tom’s insults; they tend to be fired out with a little too much forced glee, and nearly always land on the shoulders of poor old Cousin Greg. You can’t, you’ll recall, make a Tomlette without breaking some Gregs.

His smirking dismissals of Greg are the only times he seems to be genuinely comfortable. Whether it’s Greg’s boat shoes or his decision to live in Staten Island – “Dude, why stop at the ferry? Just come in from Cleveland on the Greyhound” – they tend to say more about how glad Tom is to find a safe target lower down the ladder and more unschooled in the Roys’ one-percent-of-the-one-percenters world than he is.

Nearly everyone in the Roys’ orbit throws out insults as a means of keeping their actual fears and insecurities at bay. And these fears all revolve around Logan Roy himself, whose blunt, irascible nature is where all the insults originate. But Logan’s insults tend to be completely stripped of the flippant floridness that Shiv, Tom and Roman tend to use. He goes for the jugular. “It’s my company,” he growls at Kendall when his son delivers a letter outlining a plan to depose him. “You… are a f__ing nobody.”

This is bare knuckle Dundee backstreet insulting. He’s not trying to conjure a feeling of control or form alliances. He’s a man who wants to know why the President of the United States isn’t flying out to see him. He’s at the top of the tree, and he didn't get away from his grim upbringing by playing verbal parlour games. A simple “f__ off” will do.

In the Roy-verse, the only thing worse than being insulted is being condescended to. Insults at least suggest they see each other on even footing. That’s where Logan’s eldest and most deeply deluded child Connor – would-be President of the United States and, as Shiv calls him, “the first f_ing pancake” – finds himself tasked with policing butter temperatures at a charity dinner or a gentle direction to hold the fort while everyone else actually fights the fires. The lack of insults directed at Connor indicates just how little his family respects him.

Oddly, though, insults are one of the few things which the whole family can agree on. For the Roys insults are a lingua franca. In the absence of any actual emotional intimacy – see how unnerved Shiv was when Kendall asked her for a hug at his very lowest ebb in season two – they’re the way that they tell each other that they really know each other.

That’s part of what makes the Roy saga so endlessly watchable. Despite the fact that most siblings aren’t likely to have squabbled about the fate of their dad’s global media brand, most will recognise how satisfying it is to land a dig at their brother or sister’s weakest spot.

They’re a deeply twisted family. But it’s only when they’re insulting each other that they sound like a family at all.

Succession’s 10 best insults

1. “You tell yourself you’re a good person, but you’re not a good person. Right now, I’m the real you.”

(Kendall to Shiv, S3 E2)

A slightly messianic Kendall’s rebuke to Shiv is a great example of the kind of insult which says at least as much about the insulter as the insulted.

2. “You want me to ride with you Dad?”

“You wanna suck my d___?”

“...is what he said to his son as the sexual assault allegations poured in.”

(Roman to Logan, S3 E1)

Roman reflects on Logan’s rejection of his company in an airport taxi.

3. “Nice vest Wambsgans, it’s so puffy. What’s it stuffed with, your hopes and dreams?”

(Roman to Tom, S2 E6)

Roman greets his brother-in-law and his truly vast gilet.

4. “A chapel? Do you think dad will be able to cross the threshold, or will he spontaneously combust?”

(Shiv to Logan, S1 E7)

Shiv, as the family gathers for a doomed session of counselling.

5. “Shiv thinks she’s smarter than she is. Roman could actually be good, but not right now. Kendall is … I don’t know. It’s like you put him in a big diaper and now he can s___ himself whenever he likes.”

(Rhea to Logan, S2 E7)

Rhea, an advisor brought on board by Logan, slices apart his children’s chances of succeeding him.

6. “You couldn’t get a job in a burger joint, let alone a Fortune 500, without some nepotism.”

(Kendall to Roman, S1 E2)

Kendall slaps down Roman’s pretensions to his dad’s role.

7. “So, send out the two cover stars for Toxic Male Monthly, and, uh, why don't we get Ted Bundy up there, make it a three-way?”

(Shiv to Roman and Kendall, S2 E6)

Shiv makes the case for not letting Roman and Kendall front a crucial industry panel.

8. “Someone send a telegram to Ilona telling her she’s no longer required, and my best to her cancer.”

(Logan, S1 E7)

Logan, on hearing that the extremely ill shareholder he’d been courting is going to be voting against him in a vote of no confidence.

9. “Karl, if your hands are clean it's only because your whorehouse also does manicures.”

(Logan to Karl, S3 E1)

Logan doesn’t usually get this florid, but his dismissal of Karl’s suggestion of himself for acting CEO is a beauty.

10. “The Logan Roy School of Journalism? What's next, the Jack the Ripper Women's Health Clinic?”

(Ewan to Logan, S2 E8)

Logan’s brother Ewan assesses his legacy to newsgathering.

Succession is on Sky Atlantic on Mondays at 2am and 9pm and available on demand