Life & Wisdom Quote by S. J. Perelman

Fate, in Perelman’s hands, isn’t the grand, tragic Greek apparatus; it’s a cardsharp with a greasy thumb. “Dealing from the bottom of the deck” is the kind of accusation you make when you’ve stopped believing in bad luck as random and started suspecting malice with technique. The phrasing matters: it’s not that the cards were poor, it’s that the game was rigged. Perelman compresses an entire worldview into a gambler’s grievance - the modern sense that misfortune has the audacity to be procedural.

The line lands because it treats cosmic injustice like a petty con, and that’s classic Perelman: high-stakes existential complaint rendered in low, streetwise idiom. The humor is a defense mechanism, but also a scalpel. By swapping out thunderbolts for sleight of hand, he drags “fate” down from the heavens and into the smoke-filled room, where you can at least name the trick even if you can’t stop it.

Contextually, Perelman wrote in an era that made “rigged” feel less like paranoia than pattern recognition: depression economics, world war logistics, bureaucratic indifference. The subtext is a refusal to grant suffering the dignity of inevitability. If fate is cheating, then the victim isn’t morally lacking - they’re simply playing at a crooked table. It’s cynicism with style, and, crucially, with blame redirected upward: not at oneself, not even at other players, but at the dealer who keeps smiling.