Humor & Life Quote by David Steinberg

New York law is the perfect target for a comedian because it already sounds like a punchline: prestige as a wellness hazard. Steinberg’s line lands on its bluntness, the way it refuses metaphor and just drops the ugly metric of modern success - hours. “Sucks” is doing a lot of work here. It’s not a nuanced critique of institutions; it’s the language of someone cutting through the self-mythology of the white-collar grind and calling it what it feels like at 2 a.m. under fluorescent lights.

The joke’s engine is inflation. “Eighty, sometimes a hundred” doesn’t just describe overwork; it mocks how casually that excess gets normalized. In New York especially, long hours are treated like a credential, a badge you’re supposed to wear proudly at the bar after you escape the office. Steinberg flips that moral script: if the defining feature of the job is that it devours your week, maybe the glamour is a marketing campaign.

There’s also a quiet specificity in “in New York.” It signals a culture where competition is ambient and burnout is priced into the rent. The city becomes a pressure cooker that turns ambition into a schedule, and the schedule into identity. The laugh comes from recognition: plenty of people already know it’s miserable, but they’re trained to talk about it like it’s character-building. Steinberg gives them permission to admit the obvious, and that small act of honesty is the release valve.