Justice & Law Quote by David Steinberg

The joke lands because it’s built like a confession and paced like a punchline: “huge emotional thing” sets up melodrama, “leave the law” supplies prestige, and then the rug-pull arrives with “become unemployed.” Steinberg isn’t just describing a career pivot; he’s framing reinvention in the language of social status, where quitting a “real” profession reads less like bravery and more like self-induced exile.

The subtext is a quiet cultural indictment. Law isn’t merely a job here, it’s a guarantor of legitimacy. Comedy, by contrast, is coded as risk, frivolity, and (crucially) adulthood reversed. Calling himself “unemployed” rather than “aspiring comedian” refuses the romantic myth of the artist and replaces it with the humiliating administrative truth: you’ve stepped off the conveyor belt, and the world stops taking your calls.

“to be a student again” is the tell. It softens the blow while underlining the psychological regression: returning to a state where your identity is provisional, your future graded by others, your worth not yet certified. It’s also a sly reminder that comedy itself is apprenticeship-heavy; you don’t “switch” into it, you start over at the bottom, learning rooms, timing, rejection.

Context matters: for a comedian coming of age in a period when professional tracks carried heavy moral weight, the line captures the terror of choosing an unstable calling before “creative career” became a respectable LinkedIn category. The humor is defensive, but the emotional honesty is the real flex.