Aging & Wisdom Quote by Joey Adams

Temptation gets personified here not as a lurking devil but as a fickle date who stops returning your calls. Joey Adams flips the usual moral pep talk on its head: don’t sweat the heroic self-control routine, because time will do the policing for you. It’s a comedian’s shortcut to a hard truth, delivered with a wink so you’ll swallow it.

The specific intent is comic deflation. “Avoiding temptation” is the language of sermons and self-help, the idea that virtue is a constant, sweaty struggle. Adams punctures that drama by reframing aging as an invisible chaperone. The laugh comes from the reversal: you think you’re the active agent, but biology and social desirability quietly rewrite the options menu. Temptation “avoids you” not because you’ve become wiser, but because you’ve become less tempting to temptation.

The subtext carries a double edge. On one side, it’s permission to stop posturing about purity; on the other, it’s a gentle heckle aimed at male bravado and the cultural obsession with libido as identity. It also smuggles in a melancholy note: some desires don’t get conquered, they just get outlived.

Context matters. Adams worked in an era when nightclub comedy thrived on Borscht Belt cadence and marital/sexual one-liners that could skate past censors by sounding “wholesome.” This line belongs to that tradition: a clean joke about dirty topics, using age as both punchline and shield. It lands because it makes moral anxiety feel small, then makes you notice the clock.