Life & Wisdom Quote by Rita Mae Brown

A comic writer, in Rita Mae Brown's formulation, is part knight-errant, part professional heckler. "Slay the dragons" grants comedy an epic assignment: to confront the oversized threats a culture inflates into inevitabilities - hypocrisy, cruelty, sanctimony, the pomp of institutions. Then she undercuts her own grandeur with "shoot the bull", a barroom idiom that yanks the heroic cape right off the shoulders. The pairing is the point. Brown insists humor is both high-stakes and low-down, a craft that survives by toggling between moral seriousness and streetwise deflation.

The subtext is an argument about permission. Comic writers get to say what polite society buries under euphemism. They can name the monster, then puncture the speechifying that gathers around it. That "get to" matters: she's describing comedy as a license, almost a civic exemption from decorum, earned through the expectation that jokes will land where lectures fail.

Context sharpens the blade. Brown came of age amid second-wave feminism and gay liberation, writing into a culture that often treated women's anger and queer candor as unseemly. Comedy becomes a delivery system for critique that would otherwise be dismissed as strident. The line also sketches her own tonal signature: outwardly breezy, quietly combative. It's not escapism; it's targeted mischief. The dragons are real, the bull is endless, and the comic writer is the one allowed to pick up a weapon and laugh while aiming.