Humor & Life Quote by Ring Lardner

Lardner’s line snaps like a barbed one-liner: optimism isn’t noble here, it’s a misread, a hopeful misinterpretation of what’s right in front of you. The joke works because it drags a high-minded trait down into the low comedy of bodies, desire, and embarrassment. “Bulge” versus “curve” is a tiny lexical pivot that does all the labor: one word suggests awkward protrusion, the other a flattering shape. Optimism, in this framing, is the urge to edit reality into something smoother, sexier, more narratively satisfying.

The subtext is classic early-20th-century American cynicism. Lardner isn’t praising confidence; he’s mocking the human reflex to see what we want to see, then call it a virtue. The “girl” matters, too. It’s a gendered setup that assumes women are trained to hunt for reassurance in the visual economy of attractiveness while men get to be the ones who “have” the bulge and the authority to define the terms. That imbalance is part of the punchline’s engine: it converts a woman’s supposed naivete into public entertainment.

Contextually, Lardner’s comedy came out of an era that prized wisecracks, not self-help. He wrote at the intersection of sports-page bravado, vaudeville timing, and a growing urban frankness about sex that still had to masquerade as innuendo. The line survives because it’s not really about anatomy; it’s about the way people launder wishful thinking into a worldview, then act surprised when reality doesn’t match the edit.