Life & Wisdom Quote by John Podhoretz

Podhoretz is making a small taxonomy sound like a cultural diagnosis: comedy has shifted from crafting jokes to performing people. The line’s bite comes from its casual certainty, that shrugging "used to" that implies a loss of old standards. He frames comedians and impressionists as separate "showbiz animals" not just to evoke vaudeville-era specialization, but to suggest that contemporary comedy has become a kind of evolutionary mashup - survival now favors mimicry.

The intent is less nostalgia than critique. If every comedian “does impressions,” the premise is that stand-up has moved away from argument, observation, or original verbal architecture and toward a more instantly legible skill: voice, posture, accent, celebrity calibration. Impressions are comedy’s shortcut to shared reference. You don’t have to build a premise from scratch when you can borrow the audience’s existing relationship to a politician, an actor, a podcaster, a type.

The subtext is about media saturation and algorithmic incentives. In an attention economy, the fastest laugh often comes from recognition, and impressions are recognition with a punchline stapled on. The line also hints at a flattening of identity: public figures are reduced to a handful of ticks that can be remixed on command. That’s funny, but it’s also a little bleak - comedy as compression.

Contextually, it tracks the post-SNL, post-YouTube era, where comic “range” is measured by how many voices you can toggle between, and virality rewards the clip that can be understood with the sound off and the reference already loaded.