Wit & Attitude Quote by Walter Kerr

Kerr’s line lands like a well-aimed review: brisk, funny, and a little cruel in its confidence that the audience can take the hit. The “half and half” structure is the trick. It borrows the tone of a tidy statistic, the kind of commonsense arithmetic people use to smuggle prejudice into certainty. Nobody has to ask what counts as an “idiot,” because the joke flatters the reader into assuming they’re safely in the other category. That’s the subtext: the quote is an indictment of gullibility that recruits your ego to make the indictment feel true.

But Kerr doesn’t actually let “clever” off the hook. He welds intelligence to “indecent advantage,” suggesting that what passes for savvy in public life is often just refined exploitation. The line isn’t optimistic about education curing anything; it’s skeptical about the moral direction of competence itself. If idiocy is the raw material, cleverness becomes the machinery that processes it into power, profit, influence.

As a critic, Kerr is writing from inside a profession built on sorting, judging, and puncturing pretension. The cynicism fits mid-century cultural gatekeeping: an era of mass media, advertising, and politics engineered for manipulation, where being “taken in” isn’t a private failing so much as the default condition of the modern consumer-citizen. The sting is that Kerr makes the world sound evenly divided while implying a rigged system: one group is named, the other is characterized by what it does to the first. The joke is also a warning about what we might be cheering when we applaud “smartness.”