Humor & Life Quote by Shelley Berman

A comedian saying "I quit smoking well over twenty years ago" isn’t offering a wellness testimonial; he’s setting a trap for your expectations. On paper it’s a clean, responsible sentence, the kind you’d expect from a doctor or a repentant ex-smoker. Coming from Shelley Berman, it reads like a setup delivered with a raised eyebrow: you can almost hear the pause after "quit", the invitation for the audience to wonder what, exactly, replaced it - neurosis, snacks, nagging self-righteousness, or the sheer pleasure of announcing moral progress.

The specific intent is deceptively simple: establish credibility and distance from a vice. The subtext is messier and funnier: the victory lap is the addiction’s afterlife. "Well over" is the operative phrase. It’s not a date; it’s a performance of how long he has been thinking about not smoking. That’s classic Berman territory, where the joke lives less in punch lines than in the anxious conversational rhythm of self-reporting, as if the speaker is negotiating with an unseen committee of judgment.

Context matters. Berman came up in an era when smoking wasn’t a habit so much as stage business - cigarettes as punctuation, charisma, and adult legitimacy. To quit back then could feel like opting out of cool itself. Dropping this line later in life turns the cultural shift into material: what once made you sophisticated now makes you suspect. The humor is the quiet sting of time - you stop smoking, and decades later you’re still giving it airtime.