Daily Inspiration Quote by Brendan Behan

Behan’s line is the kind of joke that smiles while it sharpens the knife. “All publicity is good” borrows the hustler’s mantra - the idea that attention, even hostile attention, can be converted into cultural capital. Then he snaps it shut with “except an obituary notice,” a punchline that turns self-promotion into a mortality gag. The wit works because it’s structured like a slogan and ends like a tombstone: a neat collision of modern media logic and the oldest limit there is.

The intent isn’t just to get a laugh; it’s to expose a cynical bargain artists are pressured to make. Publicity becomes a currency so powerful that the only “bad” kind is the kind that ends your ability to spend it. Under the joke sits a bleak observation about how reputations are manufactured: scandal, notoriety, and spectacle can be career fuel, while substance is often secondary. Behan, a dramatist with a famously turbulent public persona, knew how quickly the public eye turns a writer into a character - and how that character can start consuming the work.

Context matters: mid-century literary culture was tightening its relationship with mass media, with writers increasingly marketed as personalities. Behan’s quip reads like a preemptive self-defense against that machine. It admits complicity while mocking the rules, suggesting that “good publicity” is less about truth than about continued visibility. The obituary exception is the final twist: the only real scandal is disappearance.