Humor & Life Quote by David Cross

The cruelty here is how casual it sounds. David Cross isn’t torching Los Angeles with a manifesto; he’s doing the comedian’s deadpan shrug, the kind that lands because it treats a supposedly glamorous city as emotionally disposable. “Almost nine years” establishes credibility and patience: he didn’t just parachute in, hate the traffic, and leave. He invested real time. Then he undercuts that investment with “it would be fine,” a phrase so bland it becomes surgical. No rage, no heartbreak, just a clean severing.

The intent is classic Cross: puncture the myth that LA is the inevitable endpoint for ambitious creative people. In entertainment culture, moving to LA is often framed as destiny, validation, arrival. Cross flips it into a cautionary anecdote about how a place can take up years of your life and still fail to earn your nostalgia. The subtext is that LA sells a lifestyle of proximity - to fame, to meetings, to “industry” - but proximity isn’t intimacy, and it definitely isn’t meaning.

Context matters because Cross’s comedy persona is built on allergic reactions to self-seriousness and status games. LA can feel like a city engineered for those games: networking as personality, aspiration as identity, wellness as branding. His line implies a quiet reclamation of self: you can leave the capital of wanting and discover that nothing terrible happens. “Fine” becomes the punchline and the thesis - the scariest thing you can say about a city that demands to be a dream.