Humor & Life Quote by Bob Hope

Hope’s genius here is how he smuggles a very old American trick into a tidy golf joke: treating leisure like labor and labor like a sucker’s game. “Low 70’s” is a double-coded sweet spot. On its face it’s weather, the mild, country-club ideal. To golfers it’s also a score, an elite range most amateurs only fantasize about. Hope lets both meanings sit in the same sentence, so the punchline lands no matter which world you’re in: climate control for the rich, performance control for the vain.

The second line flips the expected narrative of grit. When it’s “hotter,” he won’t tough it out; he’ll retreat to the bar. That’s not just a quip about comfort. It’s a portrait of the postwar entertainer’s lifestyle in miniature: travel, courses, cocktails, and a wink that says the whole enterprise is optional. The bar isn’t failure; it’s the real destination. He’s puncturing the moral romance of sport as character-building, replacing it with the more honest motive of social lubrication.

Context matters: Hope was practically the patron saint of mainstream mid-century humor, a figure who could joke about privilege without threatening it. The line reassures his audience that refinement can still be self-deprecating. He’s rich enough to choose the course, famous enough to admit he’d rather drink, and savvy enough to make that admission sound like everyone’s secret plan.