Life's Pleasures Quote by William Shatner

Shatner’s joke lands because it weaponizes celebrity vanity, then spikes it with something grotesque. The setup is classic late-night fluff: the ageless star getting asked (or preemptively answering) the cosmetic question everyone pretends isn’t being asked. “Healthy and boyishly handsome” is deliberately corny, a phrase that sounds like it was cut from a 1950s fan magazine. That outdated, self-mythologizing diction is doing work: it frames Shatner as both the performer and the parody of the performer.

Then he swerves hard into horror-movie absurdity: “I drink the blood of young runaways.” The line is funny partly because it’s so excessively wrong for the premise, but also because it riffs on a modern suspicion we rarely say aloud: that celebrity youthfulness is bought, extracted, outsourced. “Runaways” makes it darker. He’s not just a cartoon vampire; he’s a predator picking the unprotected. That word drags the joke from harmless Dracula camp into a queasy satire of exploitation.

Context matters. Shatner is a legacy figure whose brand includes self-aware hamminess, internet-era memeability, and a willingness to puncture his own icon status. This is an actor leveraging his cultural position to mock the hunger for eternal youth - and to mock himself for being expected to sell it. The intent isn’t to scandalize; it’s to deflate the celebrity wellness catechism with a punchline that admits, in exaggerated form, the uncomfortable power dynamics underneath.