"I knew I had arrived," wrote Lloyd, "when taxi drivers would say, 'You're that twit on the Billy Cotton Show, aren't you?'" That was an understatement: he was also that twit in School for Scoundrels (1960), Doctor in Clover (1966), and two Beatles films, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965).
Like the French satirical television show that twits the United States for being the "World Company" that invades people's lives around the globe, the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, expresses frustration, and perhaps a little envy, at America's dominion.
And then bake them in a tweeters pie and say - facebook that, you twit!
Can I take your bowl, Ma'am?" I knew he was just being polite, but I had to suppress the urge to say, "Don't call me that, you twit.
Essentially, it becomes a raucous audience-participation adventure to secure the freedom of the Muggle-Wumps, a family of monkey-like creatures that the Twits hold in captivity and force to perform circus tricks.
But, seizing on the book's hint that the Twits once worked in a circus, Walsh has them throw a garden party for a trio of entertainers whose fairground they have stolen.
The most recent spoof to hit the Web is a video called "The Twit Network," that imagines the retelling of Twitter's genesis.
"Why did you not get in instead of that daft twit?" It's a fair question, one that Andy Burnham admits that he's spent a long time thinking about, though he's too diplomatic to point out that he's still in the daft twit's cabinet; is, in fact, the daft twit's shadow home secretary.
Twitter is so close to TWiT that I'm afraid it's really confusing.
In the end there is something vaguely condescending about the author's portrait of Tony, who is presented as such a myopic and passive-aggressive twit that the reader finds it hard not to be annoyed with him.
Perry, however, is such an affable-seeming twit that it would surprise nobody if he got tricked into signing over the deed to his house to a wisecracking cartoon rabbit.
