Wit & Attitude Quote by Norm MacDonald

Norm Macdonald lands this line with the deceptively blunt cadence of someone “just noticing” something obvious, which is exactly the trap. It’s a joke shaped like a confession: “I think” softens the claim into casual opinion, then “clever people” quietly becomes the target. By the time “poor people” arrives, you expect a critique of poverty stereotypes. Instead, the punch is that the supposedly intelligent are the ones making the stupidest error: confusing money with IQ, comfort with merit.

The intent isn’t to defend poverty by romanticizing it; it’s to mock a smug worldview where intellect is a social badge. “Clever” is doing double duty here. It’s praise on paper, but in Macdonald’s mouth it reads as a kind of shallow, self-satisfied cleverness: the type that aces word games and job interviews, then treats that success as proof of moral and mental superiority. The subtext is that class prejudice often comes dressed as rational assessment, as if it’s just “common sense” to assume the poor are less capable.

Context matters because Macdonald’s persona thrived on underplaying the punchline and refusing the audience the comfort of easy virtue. He isn’t delivering a TED Talk about structural inequality; he’s needling the audience’s impulse to sort people into winners and losers. The line works because it makes elitism look not only cruel, but embarrassingly provincial - a failure of imagination masquerading as intelligence.