Creativity Quote by Allan Sherman

Sherman slips a love story into a joke structure, then lets the joke collapse under the weight of what he actually means. Scrabble is the decoy: a cultural shorthand for cleverness, competition, and that mid-century faith that wordplay can measure anything. He name-drops the most quantifiable brag in the game - "the highest triple word score" - only to dismiss it as emotionally illiterate. Numbers can crown a winner; they can’t translate intimacy.

The line works because it’s a comedian’s reversal. You expect a punchline about Scrabble itself, or about language, or about being bad at games. Instead, he pivots to "the game Natalie and I played every afternoon", a phrase that stays coy on purpose. The vagueness is the point: whatever their ritual was, it’s private, repetitive, and therefore profound. "Every afternoon" does heavy lifting, suggesting a domestic rhythm, a relationship built less on fireworks than on dependable delight.

Subtextually, Sherman is taking a swipe at performance culture - the idea that the best expression is the most optimized one. Scrabble becomes a metaphor for public achievement and verbal virtuosity, the kind of thing you can tally and show off. His real affection lives off the scoreboard, in an unnameable game that resists translation into points, words, even anecdotes. For a musician-comic, that’s also a small manifesto: the sharpest wit in the world still isn’t the same as tenderness, and the cleverest language can be exactly the wrong tool for saying what matters.