Humor & Life Quote by Marty Feldman

A joke built like a dare: Marty Feldman yokes comedy to sodomy not to moralize, but to spike the room with taboo and make the audience feel their own reflexes. The line is a trapdoor. It lures you toward the old, priggish language of “unnatural acts” (legalistic, churchy, stiff-collared), then uses that very stiffness as the punch. Feldman’s intent isn’t to condemn either act; it’s to expose how “unnatural” is often a social weapon disguised as a description.

As a comedian who made his face and voice into elastic instruments, Feldman understood that comedy is, in a technical sense, “unnatural”: it interrupts polite conversation, violates expected rhythms, and demands that we enjoy what we’re not supposed to enjoy. It’s transgressive by design. Pairing it with a historically criminalized, stigmatized sex act is an escalation meant to highlight comedy’s kinship with other forbidden pleasures: both are private impulses dragged into public judgment.

The subtext is also about performance. Sodomy, in the anxious imagination of censors, is sex that refuses reproductive “purpose.” Comedy, to scolds, is speech that refuses productive “purpose.” Neither builds the factory; both waste time gloriously. Feldman’s era matters: mid-20th-century Britain still carried legal and cultural hangovers about homosexuality and obscenity. By borrowing the vocabulary of repression, Feldman turns prudery into a prop, daring you to laugh not just at the line, but at the society that made it sound scandalous in the first place.