Parenting & Family Quote by David Letterman

Letterman’s joke lands like a paper cut: quick, casual, and then you realize where the sting is coming from. On the surface it’s a “congratulations” gag, the old late-night move of dressing up scandal as celebration. Underneath, it’s an accusation with a punchline attached: that Woody Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn isn’t merely controversial, it’s predatory in its logic, a life plan built around grooming.

The phrasing does the work. “In order” mimics polite society, the talk-show voice that smooths over anything. Then “brand new baby daughter” turns the family-announcement script into setup. The turn arrives with “Woody’s plan,” a phrase that reframes the situation from messy human drama into calculated strategy. “Grow his own wives” is deliberately grotesque; it collapses adoption, fatherhood, and romantic partnership into one unthinkable pipeline. It’s not subtle, and it isn’t trying to be. The line weaponizes the cultural discomfort many viewers already felt, translating unease into a single, repeatable barb.

Context matters: Letterman’s era of late-night thrived on being the place where public figures could be punished in effigy, safely, through comedy. In the early 1990s, Allen’s story was tabloid oxygen, and “edgy” meant saying the ugly part out loud while the audience laughed to prove they could handle it. The subtext isn’t just about Allen; it’s about a culture negotiating boundaries in real time, using jokes as both moral verdict and entertainment.