"Epitaph for a dead waiter - God finally caught his eye"
About this Quote
A perfect Kaufman barb: a throwaway line that doubles as an indictment of how we allocate attention, pity, and power. "God finally caught his eye" reads like a divine meet-cute, but the setup - "Epitaph for a dead waiter" - makes it cruelly procedural. The waiter’s job is to catch eyes; that’s the economy of service work. You exist as a peripheral blur until a customer needs something, then you’re summoned with a glance. Kaufman flips it: the only gaze that ultimately matters, the celestial one, arrives late. Not in life, not in the grind, but as a punchline at death.
The intent is comic, but the comedy is prosecutorial. Kaufman, a Broadway veteran of fast cruelty and faster timing, compresses a social hierarchy into a single gag: waiters are professionally unseen, reduced to responsiveness, their humanity deferred. The subtext is less religious than transactional. "God" functions like the ultimate patron, the one customer you can’t hustle, tip, or appease. "Finally" is the dagger, suggesting a lifetime of being overlooked, including by whatever moral order is supposed to notice the meek.
In context, this is early-to-mid 20th-century Kaufman: urbane, unsentimental, suspicious of pieties. It’s also theater-world observational humor; waiters, like stagehands and understudies, keep the show running while the spotlight hits someone else. The epitaph lands because it mimics the formality of death-writing, then punctures it with the petty mechanics of everyday life. It turns an afterlife promise into a service-industry complaint, and that smallness is exactly the point.
The intent is comic, but the comedy is prosecutorial. Kaufman, a Broadway veteran of fast cruelty and faster timing, compresses a social hierarchy into a single gag: waiters are professionally unseen, reduced to responsiveness, their humanity deferred. The subtext is less religious than transactional. "God" functions like the ultimate patron, the one customer you can’t hustle, tip, or appease. "Finally" is the dagger, suggesting a lifetime of being overlooked, including by whatever moral order is supposed to notice the meek.
In context, this is early-to-mid 20th-century Kaufman: urbane, unsentimental, suspicious of pieties. It’s also theater-world observational humor; waiters, like stagehands and understudies, keep the show running while the spotlight hits someone else. The epitaph lands because it mimics the formality of death-writing, then punctures it with the petty mechanics of everyday life. It turns an afterlife promise into a service-industry complaint, and that smallness is exactly the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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