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Wit & Attitude Quote by Neil Innes

"And Roger was crazy with his robots and everything"

About this Quote

There is something wonderfully deflationary about a line that drops the word "crazy" next to "robots" and then shrugs, "and everything". Neil Innes, a writer best known in the orbit of British comedic surrealism (from Bonzo Dog antics to Monty Python-adjacent mischief), understands how to puncture grandiosity without breaking the spell. The sentence feels like an aside you overhear at a party: intimate, gossipy, faintly exasperated. That casualness is the point. It turns a potentially weighty fixation (robots: futurism, progress, obsession) into a domestic nuisance, a hobby that has gotten out of hand.

The specific intent reads like character work in miniature. "Roger" is sketched not through description but through someone else's weary summary of him. The speaker isn't interested in technical details or in validating the obsession; they're interested in the social fallout of it. "Crazy" isn't clinical here. It's the comedic adjective we use when a friend has become a walking single-issue campaign. The trailing "and everything" is a masterstroke of dismissal: it compresses a whole catalog of eccentricities into three words, implying this is only the latest installment in an ongoing saga.

Subtextually, the line satirizes the modern romance with gadgets and the men who vanish into them. It also mocks the storyteller's own laziness, admitting they can't be bothered to inventory Roger's passions. Context matters: Innes' world prizes the throwaway phrase that carries more than it admits. The humor lands because it trusts the audience to hear the unspoken: we've all met Roger.

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TopicFunny
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Neil Innes on Roger Spear and his robots
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About the Author

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Neil Innes (December 9, 1944 - December 29, 2019) was a Writer from United Kingdom.

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