Marriage Quote by Dennis Miller

Hollywood, in Dennis Miller's telling, is a place where permanence gets downgraded to a novelty toy. The Etch-A-Sketch punchline lands because it pairs two symbols that should never share a sentence: a marriage license, the bureaucratic seal of commitment, and a plastic rectangle designed for temporary doodles you can erase with a shake. The joke isn't just that celebrity marriages are short-lived; it's that the culture around them treats the whole institution as casually editable. Commitment becomes content.

Miller's intent is classic late-20th-century stand-up cynicism: take an ideal Americans still claim to revere, then expose the ways status, money, and attention hollow it out. Hollywood functions as shorthand for a wider ecosystem: publicists, tabloids, quick courtships, and the constant pressure to rebrand. An Etch-A-Sketch is the perfect prop because it's not simply disposable; it's performative. You draw for the sake of being seen drawing. That mirrors a certain celebrity romance logic: the wedding as premiere, the marriage as a season, the divorce as the inevitable renewal cycle.

The subtext is moral but not preachy. Miller isn't defending traditionalism so much as skewering a marketplace where even vows get treated like erasable copy. The line also flatters the audience's suspicion: you get to feel savvy, in on the con, watching a town that can manufacture anything - even sincerity - then wipe it clean when the next headline arrives.