Life's Pleasures Quote by David Brenner

Brenner’s line is a classic comedian’s judo move: he takes a morally freighted identity label and translates it into a blunt, slightly grotesque rulebook. “Vegetarian” often arrives in conversation wrapped in virtue, discipline, maybe even quiet judgment. His punchline punctures that aura by redefining the practice in terms of reproduction, not suffering or health. It’s funny because it’s technically adjacent to truth while being willfully, aggressively wrong.

The intent isn’t to seriously describe vegetarianism; it’s to mock how humans build moral hierarchies out of eating. By shifting the frame from “animals” to “anything that can have children,” he invites you to picture the absurd edge cases (eggs, dairy, fish, plants that reproduce) and feel the definition collapse under its own logic. The subtext: dietary purity is slippery, and people who brand themselves through food choices are easy targets because the rules are never as clean as the self-image.

There’s also a darker comic engine at work: childbirth is an emotional trigger word. Using it in a sentence about food yanks the listener out of the cozy “menu” mindset and into a primal, bodily one. That discomfort is part of the laugh. In the late-20th-century American stand-up tradition Brenner came up in, this kind of line plays to an audience wary of sanctimony, eager for a one-liner that treats ethics as another form of social performance ripe for skewering.