Justice & Law Quote by Dennis Miller

Miller’s joke fires in three directions at once: at the pseudo-authority of “a recent police study,” at the culture of policing, and at the grim calculus citizens are forced to run in their heads when an encounter turns volatile. The line borrows the cadence of public-safety messaging and social-science reporting, then smuggles in something obscene: the idea that your survival odds depend on the officer’s body type. That whiplash is the engine. “Study” implies neutrality and rigor; “fat cop” is deliberately blunt, unclinical, a heckle shouted into the lab.

The intent is less to make a health joke than to puncture the moral alibi that shootings are purely the suspect’s fault. “If you run” is the standard justification, the tidy narrative that transforms fear into culpability. Miller keeps that clause but adds a corrupt variable: not intent, not threat, just fitness. The subtext is that institutional power can be sloppy, reactive, and irrational, and it still gets to write the official story afterward.

Context matters: this is late-20th-century Miller, when his persona thrived on cynicism about institutions and media language. The bit also lands in the uneasy space where comedy touches real harm. It’s funny because it’s phrased like advice, but the laughter catches because it implies a system where the citizen is a data point and the trigger finger is an actuarial risk. The joke doesn’t solve anything; it exposes the perversity of needing to game the system at all.