Faith & Spirit Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Sheridan takes a shopworn backstage question and flips it into a small act of social criticism. Actors, he notes, are treated as oddities for repeating lines night after night, as if the stage were the only place where routine becomes visible. The punchline lands because it collapses the distance between performer and audience: everyone repeats themselves. We rehearse our grievances, our flirtations, our office pleasantries, our little daily scripts of politeness and complaint. The theater isn’t an exception; it’s just honest about the repetition.

The joke has teeth in a way that feels distinctly Sheridan. As a playwright steeped in Restoration-inspired satire and London’s late-18th-century culture of manners, he understood that society runs on performance. “Don’t we all anyway” is a sly indictment of a world where identity is partly a set of reusable lines, delivered for approval. The audience’s supposed superiority over the actor is revealed as self-flattery.

“Might as well get paid for it” sharpens the cynicism into something almost modern: a wink at wage labor and commodified persona. If we’re all stuck cycling through the same exchanges, the real anomaly isn’t the actor’s repetition; it’s that most people do it for free, under the guise of sincerity or duty. Sheridan’s intent isn’t to romanticize acting but to demystify it, using the theater as a mirror for social life: the stage simply admits what everyone else is busy pretending isn’t true.