Creativity Quote by Joe Murray

The punchline here isn’t “banana versus cheese” so much as the dead-serious boardroom logic that tries to domesticate weirdness into something pitchable. Joe Murray draws a clean, oddly philosophical line: cheese smells funny, but bananas are funny. One is accidental comedy, a bodily reaction; the other is baked into the object’s vibe. A banana is already a cartoon prop - slapstick curvature, peel-as-costume, instant sight gag. Cheese, by contrast, is sensory and adult: funk, rot-adjacent aromas, the joke you make when you’re trapped in an elevator, not the one you animate.

Murray’s real target is the executive note: replace the banana with cheese “because they thought it was funnier.” That’s comedy-by-substitution, the corporate belief that humor is a fungible asset you can swap like a logo color. The word “seriously” does heavy lifting; it frames the request as sincere, which makes it absurd. The subtext is a familiar creative-industry tug-of-war: artists build humor from character and internal logic, while executives chase a safer, more legible gag - something you can explain in a meeting without sounding strange.

“Swamp told the whole story” hints at the oral history of a production room, where the best evidence of how culture gets made is the war stories. Murray isn’t just reminiscing; he’s defending a sensibility. Bananas aren’t “funnier” because they’re random. They’re funnier because they’re right.