Wealth & Money Quote by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s line lands because it dresses a dirty joke in Sunday clothes, then yanks the altar cloth. The opening clause - "I believe" - borrows the pious cadence of a creed, the kind of setup that primes you for sincerity and values. Then come the soothing adjectives: "beautiful, natural, wholesome". It’s a checklist of cultural approval, the language people use to sanitize sex when they want it to sound mature, enlightened, even healthful. Martin lets that earnest register build just long enough to feel almost plausible.

The trapdoor is the last five words: "that money can buy". It collapses romance into commerce with the bluntness of a price tag, puncturing both prudish moralism and self-congratulatory sex-positivity in the same beat. The joke isn’t only that sex can be purchased; it’s that our rhetoric around sex is often a form of buying too - buying respectability, modernity, cool. Martin exposes how quickly "natural" becomes a brand attribute when attached to desire.

Context matters: Martin’s peak-era persona was the “wild and crazy guy,” a parody of male confidence and consumer appetite. In that frame, the line reads like a critique of a culture that markets everything, even intimacy, while insisting it’s doing something pure. The brilliance is its double sting: it makes you laugh at hypocrisy, then realize you’re not entirely outside the punchline.