Wit & Attitude Quote by Bette Midler

Self-improvement advice, delivered like a raised eyebrow. Bette Midler frames her “pact” as a private rule, but it lands as a public roast: if you’re regularly choosing entertainment “stupider than you,” she implies, you’re training your brain to coast. The line works because it flatters and scolds at the same time. It’s a joke with a built-in mirror.

Midler’s comic persona has always thrived on mixing glamour with bluntness, and this quote carries that same showbiz snap. She isn’t handwringing about “culture” in an academic way; she’s talking like a working performer who knows attention is a finite resource. What you watch isn’t neutral. It’s rehearsal. If your downtime is filled with low-effort noise, your inner standards quietly recalibrate downward, and “stupid” starts to feel normal, even comforting.

There’s also a sly class-and-taste subtext. “Stupider” is deliberately impolite, an old-school, New York-ish way of refusing the polite fiction that all content is equally valuable. In an era where algorithms reward the loudest, broadest, most frictionless thing, her pact reads like a pre-streaming manifesto: curate or be curated.

The kicker is “It’s helped me a lot,” which shifts the joke into testimony. Midler isn’t claiming moral purity; she’s claiming professional hygiene. For an actress who built a career on sharp timing and sharper instincts, protecting the mind from junk isn’t snobbery. It’s maintenance.