"Even the police have an unlisted number"
About this Quote
A throwaway line that lands like a brick: authority wants privacy too. Morey Amsterdam, a comic actor who made a career out of puncturing everyday pretensions, turns a mundane detail (an unlisted phone number) into a sly indictment. The joke isn’t merely that cops are hard to reach; it’s that the people tasked with “serving the public” reserve the right to disappear from it.
The intent is to spotlight a double standard without ever sounding like a sermon. An unlisted number is a small, almost petty form of power: access denied, boundaries enforced, accountability routed to a switchboard. By framing it as “even the police,” Amsterdam implies we already expect unlisted numbers from the wealthy, the famous, the prickly neighbor. The punchline is that the institution that demands compliance and information gets to opt out of reciprocity.
The subtext plays well in the mid-century American context Amsterdam knew: the postwar expansion of policing, a growing bureaucracy, and a public increasingly trained to treat “the police” as both protector and untouchable class. It also anticipates a modern feeling: the frustration of trying to reach a system that can reach you instantly. Today the unlisted number reads like an analog ancestor of no-reply emails, automated phone trees, and opaque complaint processes.
Comedy works here because it shrinks a vast political problem into a single domestic annoyance. You laugh, then you notice the door it opens: if even the police can’t be contacted directly, who exactly is the system designed to be responsive to?
The intent is to spotlight a double standard without ever sounding like a sermon. An unlisted number is a small, almost petty form of power: access denied, boundaries enforced, accountability routed to a switchboard. By framing it as “even the police,” Amsterdam implies we already expect unlisted numbers from the wealthy, the famous, the prickly neighbor. The punchline is that the institution that demands compliance and information gets to opt out of reciprocity.
The subtext plays well in the mid-century American context Amsterdam knew: the postwar expansion of policing, a growing bureaucracy, and a public increasingly trained to treat “the police” as both protector and untouchable class. It also anticipates a modern feeling: the frustration of trying to reach a system that can reach you instantly. Today the unlisted number reads like an analog ancestor of no-reply emails, automated phone trees, and opaque complaint processes.
Comedy works here because it shrinks a vast political problem into a single domestic annoyance. You laugh, then you notice the door it opens: if even the police can’t be contacted directly, who exactly is the system designed to be responsive to?
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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