"Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar"
About this Quote
Asthma is the straight man here; absurdity gets the punchline. Steve Allen takes a mundane, slightly vulnerable confession about a chronic condition and flips it into a vaudeville-grade image: a dog, smugly puffing a cigar. The joke works because it’s built on escalation that’s both logical and ridiculous. Cigars and dogs are plausible triggers; combining them in one “offender” turns irritation into a cartoon villain. Allen isn’t really talking about respiratory health as much as he’s showing how comedy can reclaim the nuisance of living in a body that has demands.
The subtext is a quiet power move: he refuses the role of fragile patient. By making asthma the premise rather than the tragedy, he converts limitation into material. That was Allen’s signature as a mid-century entertainer who helped define modern television’s casual, conversational comedy. His humor often came from taking polite, everyday observations and smuggling in silliness that exposed how arbitrarily “serious” we decide to be.
There’s cultural context, too. This line lands from a time when cigars were a status prop and smoking in public was normal, even glamorous, while dogs were increasingly treated as family. Allen threads those two symbols together to suggest that the real annoyance isn’t any single irritant; it’s the way the world casually imposes them on you. The dog with the cigar is impossible, but the feeling behind it isn’t: sometimes what you can’t breathe around is other people’s idea of normal.
The subtext is a quiet power move: he refuses the role of fragile patient. By making asthma the premise rather than the tragedy, he converts limitation into material. That was Allen’s signature as a mid-century entertainer who helped define modern television’s casual, conversational comedy. His humor often came from taking polite, everyday observations and smuggling in silliness that exposed how arbitrarily “serious” we decide to be.
There’s cultural context, too. This line lands from a time when cigars were a status prop and smoking in public was normal, even glamorous, while dogs were increasingly treated as family. Allen threads those two symbols together to suggest that the real annoyance isn’t any single irritant; it’s the way the world casually imposes them on you. The dog with the cigar is impossible, but the feeling behind it isn’t: sometimes what you can’t breathe around is other people’s idea of normal.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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