Daily Inspiration Quote by Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge’s line is a little hand grenade lobbed at polite society: if you’re laughing, you’ve already broken the rules that “good taste” exists to enforce. The joke is built on a deliberately indecent collision - “good taste” yoked to “humor,” then clinched with an obscene simile that makes prudishness recoil on contact. It’s not just shock for its own sake; it’s a demonstration. He proves his point by committing the very breach he’s describing, turning decorum into the butt of the joke.

The subtext is a suspicion of respectability as a social technology. “Good taste” isn’t an aesthetic standard so much as a badge system: who gets to speak, what may be said, and how safely. Humor, especially the kind Muggeridge practiced as a journalist and satirist, is an unruly solvent. It exposes vanity, hypocrisy, and moral posing - the stuff public life runs on. If you’re truly committed to “taste,” you’ll sand down the sharp edges that make comedy dangerous; you’ll end up with something pleasant, approved, and basically toothless.

Context matters. Muggeridge came out of a 20th-century Britain thick with class codes, broadcast standards, and a press culture that both policed and profited from scandal. His career was marked by a contrarian moral streak and an allergy to fashionable consensus. So the line reads less like a cheap gag than a worldview: comedy is a form of disrespect, and any culture that demands respectability first is asking to be lied to politely.