"A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary"
About this Quote
Allen’s line lands because it turns bureaucracy into a perfect closed circuit of evasion. Every phrase tightens the screw: “the unprepared” suggests not just incompetence, but the institutional comfort with it; these are people selected precisely because no one expects much. “Appointed by the unwilling” shifts blame upward, implying leadership that treats delegation as self-protection. The punchline isn’t merely that committees waste time, but that they’re engineered to distribute responsibility so thinly that accountability evaporates.
The final sting, “to do the unnecessary,” is Allen’s quiet accusation that the work itself is often a pretext. Committees don’t just fail at urgent tasks; they generate tasks that justify their existence. That’s the subtext modern readers recognize in endless stakeholder meetings, performative “task forces,” and the ritual of producing memos no one reads. The unnecessary becomes a safe sandbox: activity without risk, motion without commitment.
Context matters: Allen worked in mid-century American mass media, when corporate and institutional life was swelling alongside government agencies and wartime-era administrative habits. As a comedian, he aimed at the soft underbelly of public life - the places where people hide behind process. The quote’s elegance is its symmetry: unprepared/unwilling/unnecessary. It’s not just a joke about committees; it’s a miniature theory of how institutions protect themselves from decisive action, and why “group decision-making” can so easily become group self-exoneration.
The final sting, “to do the unnecessary,” is Allen’s quiet accusation that the work itself is often a pretext. Committees don’t just fail at urgent tasks; they generate tasks that justify their existence. That’s the subtext modern readers recognize in endless stakeholder meetings, performative “task forces,” and the ritual of producing memos no one reads. The unnecessary becomes a safe sandbox: activity without risk, motion without commitment.
Context matters: Allen worked in mid-century American mass media, when corporate and institutional life was swelling alongside government agencies and wartime-era administrative habits. As a comedian, he aimed at the soft underbelly of public life - the places where people hide behind process. The quote’s elegance is its symmetry: unprepared/unwilling/unnecessary. It’s not just a joke about committees; it’s a miniature theory of how institutions protect themselves from decisive action, and why “group decision-making” can so easily become group self-exoneration.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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