Image: Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope gave the best odd compliments. (Image: NBC)

The art of giving a compliment is a mighty precarious one.

Some compliments are silver bullets, guaranteed to please. Like, “Has anyone ever told you your voice sounds like Beyonce’s?” or, “You tell the best jokes “, or simply, “Damn, you look amazing.”

But the world is also full of people who decide to veer off the well-trod praise path in favour of something more creative, oddly specific, or downright weird — leaving their poor victims to wonder whether they should be flattered, annoyed, cut to the bone, deeply amused, or all of the above.

For instance, a few years ago a well-meaning acquaintance told me, “You know, you should go to Asia because they’dactuallythink your pale skin was really beautiful over there.” Um… thanks?

Then there was the guy in a bar who told my friend she was the prettiest thing he’d seen “since a lamb roast.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

I’m not the only one who’s been slapped in the face with a weird or awkward compliment — here are some crackersThe Glowteam members and Redditors were willing to share.

Doppelgangers

“I had a woman tell me I looked like a young John Travolta. I was an 18 year old girl.” — moIIy

“A girl once told me, ‘You’re really handsome, like Willie Nelson.’ At the time, I was 16, and Willie was 65. Um, thanks?” — captainmagictrousers

Feeling hip

“After a night of unsuccessfully trying to pick me up, a guy finally told me at 3am, ‘I know you’re not gonna come home with me, but I need you to know: you have the biggest child-bearing hips I’ve ever seen and I find that very appealing.'”

“I was told I had a good, child-bearing body.”

Watch: Mamamia staff share the biggest lie they’ve ever told. (Post continues after video.)

Sitting pretty

“A random guy in a lift told me with complete confidence, ‘Oh, you’re actually pretty for a Lebanese girl!'”

“A man told me I have ‘pre-Raphaelite hands’.”

Bedside manners

“‘Oh you have such a pretty liver!’ This compliment came from a nurse doing an ultrasound of my liver and kidneys. She told me I had lovely internal organs.” — tenlilindians

“After getting an IUD placed, the doctor told me I had a friendly cervix. Not sure what that even means.” — wiloworm

What even is a friendly cervix...? (istock)

Lethally beautiful

"When I was a baby, an old woman told told my mum that I was 'too beautiful to live.'" — monders337

Never gets old

"'I love watching you get old' - my sleepy husband while we were riding home on the metro late at night. We've been together for 16 years, I knew what he meant. It was so awkwardly sweet I had to laugh." — disarm33 (Post continues after gallery)

The best mild-mannered insults.

well mannered curses 6