Jousting Veep Sara Z. Duterte is fast proving she’s no mistress of the verbal hand grenade.

Her omnipresent pompous, sneering verbal grenades in recent days were no more than duds quickly lobbed back at her, trolled easily with a smirk and a punchline, proving undoubtedly her tirades are devoid of both substance and style.

Political substance and style need not be mutually exclusive, however. Not only can rage and reason sit side by side but they can be stylishly entertaining and provocative of real thinking at the same time.

On this score, it means the Veep has to work harder to convince the rest of us sh. deserves the political potency bestowed upon her by the memes-loving little minds typical of her tribe, most of whom find it much easier to be critical than correct.

Nevertheless, we do of course have an inkling as to where the Veep’s rage is coming from.

Obviously, she is now exhaling all that long-hoarded venom and all the distempered humor that for months had accumulated in her heart and that are now dominating her present mortified life.

Yet, in the vengeful ways she’s been lately opponent-baiting she is more like a mad punk princess spray-painting lousy jokes on empty walls — to the sniggering delight of many bobbing heads of the liberal commentariat class and to the utter panic of her vapid hashtag army of trolls and fanatics.

So, the question now is: Will she pick up this challenge and improve her lackluster abilities?

Additionally: Will she be able to henceforth come out with well-said, well-thought-out censures, those short of subpoena-able repartee?

Our fingers are crossed.

But while we confessedly won’t actively try to dissuade her from advertising the vacant way she is talking now, if she and her cohorts are open to some unsolicited advice, it’s best that she first lose her liking for dismissing critics as “intellectually challenged” or stupid since it only reveals her childish view that the only agreeable person is a person who agrees with her.

Nowhere was this personal failing in full naked display than when Palace spokesperson Claire Castro, far wittier and more intelligent than her, put down the Veep for her confused answer to criticism that she was pro-China— she said she wasn’t “pro-any country.”

To state the obvious, did the Veep mean she also wasn’t pro-Philippines?

Which is why Spokesperson Castro referenced Rizal when she smartly retorted in devastating Filipino: “Kung ang hindi magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit sa hayop at malansang isda, ano pa kaya ang amoy ng isang umamin na hindi nagmamahal sa sariling bansa?”

(“If one who does not love his own language is worse than a beast and a foul-smelling fish, what would one who admits they don’t love their own country smell like?”)

Following this, the Veep has to rid herself of her overt reliance on her bad memory and on her imagination for facts when putting across contemptuous censures that she believes are good and proper.

Of her bad memory, the most recent instance of it was her ill-thought-out censure of the President for being present at the burning of billions worth of illegal drugs.

To the Veep’s virtual embarrassment, the Palace came out with a blown-up tarpaulin of a previous news account of her ICC-detained father doing exactly the same photo-op. Oopsie!

Meanwhile, nothing more tellingly informs us of her fondness for relying on her imagination for facts than when she squawks about strategic US missile deployments but there’s never a peep against China’s continuing harassment in the West Philippine Sea.