Humor & Life Quote by Ruby Wax

Ruby Wax’s joke works because it treats political power like a rack of costumes and then yanks the audience toward the one that will get laughs without getting her booed. “I can’t do anything too serious like Saddam Hussein” isn’t moral handwringing so much as a comic boundary check: some figures are so soaked in atrocity that impersonation stops being satire and starts feeling like tourism in suffering. Wax frames that line as a practical limitation - “can’t do” - which slyly acknowledges the unwritten rules of mainstream comedy: you can’t make a room relax around genocide.

Then she pivots to Bill Clinton, a safe target precisely because his scandal is legible as farce. Clinton is not “serious” in the Saddam sense; he’s serious in consequence but cartoonish in public mythology - charm, libido, triangulation, the smile that implies he’s already talked his way out of whatever you’re about to accuse him of. Wax’s “That’d be fun” signals the real engine here: impersonation is a pleasure device, a chance to perform charisma and evasiveness, not to litigate policy.

The subtext is also a critique of audience appetite. Western pop culture will happily recycle Clinton as entertainment, while treating Saddam as untouchable horror, even though both are political actors with real-world fallout. Wax isn’t equating them; she’s exposing how comedic “permission” is granted: not by impact, but by familiarity, media saturation, and the kind of scandal that can be converted into a punchline without ruining the mood.