Wit & Attitude Quote by Mikhail Baryshnikov

Baryshnikov’s line lands like a perfectly timed pratfall: elegant, controlled, and devastating. He opens with an overbuilt insult - “extraordinary mediocrity” and “colossal stupidity” are oxymoronic in spirit, as if the production’s only true achievement was the scale of its blandness. That’s the joke, but it’s also the diagnosis. The phrasing mimics promotional language (“extraordinary,” “colossal”) and flips it into a critique of an industry that sells bigness as quality. He’s not just mad at a bad project; he’s mocking the machinery that confuses hype, access, and brand power for taste.

The kicker, “Otherwise, it was great,” is pure dancer’s timing: a deadpan tag that turns rage into comedy and keeps him from sounding merely bitter. It signals a performer’s survival skill in a business where bridges are currency. He can scorch CAA - an emblem of Hollywood packaging and dealmaking - while still performing professionalism, the same way artists often have to smile through notes from people who’ve never been onstage.

Context matters: Baryshnikov is a virtuoso who defected from the Soviet system partly to escape control, only to meet a different kind of control in the West - not ideological, but commercial. The subtext is that creativity gets strangled when “projects” are assembled like products, optimized for attachments rather than ideas. His wit isn’t decorative; it’s a refusal to let mediocrity pass as inevitability, delivered with the cool precision of someone who knows exactly what excellence looks like.