Love & Passion Quote by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s line is a scalpel disguised as a groaner: it pretends to be prudish advice, then reveals it’s really a panic joke about intimacy. The first move is the mock PSA voice - “Don’t have sex man” - which sets you up for a moralistic punchline. Instead of the expected warning about pregnancy or disease, Martin offers a ridiculous causal chain: sex leads not to consequences, but to closeness. Kissing is framed as the slippery slope, and “pretty soon” lands like a comedian’s alarm bell, treating emotional escalation as the real hazard.

The subtext is less “sex is bad” than “connection is complicated.” Talking - the banal, necessary act of relating to another person - becomes the punchline because it’s the part that can’t be gamed. Sex can be imagined as private, physical, even transactional; conversation forces recognition, negotiation, and vulnerability. Martin’s genius is locating the dread in the ordinary. The laugh comes from how unheroic the fear is: not commitment in grand terms, just the tedious, terrifying reality of having to engage with someone else’s interior life.

Context matters: Martin’s stand-up persona often played the smug know-it-all while undermining himself with absurd logic. The joke also reflects a long-running (and pointedly male) comedic tradition of treating women as “them,” an unknowable other. That dated distancing is part of the mechanism - and part of what modern audiences now hear as both funny and telling: the comedy is a tell on the speaker’s immaturity, not a manifesto about sex.