Humor & Life Quote by Don Rickles

Rickles lands the joke by pretending it is humble self-critique, then weaponizing that humility into a cultural read: Eddie Fisher landing Elizabeth Taylor is an act of romantic overreach so absurd it becomes physical comedy. The Empire State Building isn’t just big; it’s iconic, public, and impossible to handle privately. A bar of soap is laughably inadequate. Put them together and you get a metaphor for mismatch that feels instantly legible, even if you don’t know the couple’s full tabloid lore.

The specific intent is twofold: puncture celebrity glamour and reassert the comic’s power over it. Rickles’ persona thrived on insulting the room with a grin, and here he “insults” without cruelty by aiming at scale, not character. Fisher becomes a stand-in for any ordinary guy who suddenly finds himself in the blast radius of a myth. Taylor, famously larger than life, isn’t framed as a person so much as a monument - which is exactly how mid-century America consumed her: as architecture, as spectacle, as headline.

The subtext is that fame distorts relationships into public infrastructure. Washing a building is maintenance for onlookers; it’s labor performed under scrutiny. Rickles implies that being married to Taylor isn’t a romance you live inside, it’s a job you fail at in public. Coming from a comedian in the golden age of nightclub insult and gossip-column celebrity, the line also signals a permission structure: everyone’s watching, everyone’s judging, so the only honest response is to laugh at the sheer, impossible logistics.