"I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine"
About this Quote
Milligan’s line is a heckle disguised as a tribute, and it lands because it treats the cultural untouchable - Shakespeare - like an annoyingly successful colleague who won’t return your calls. The joke runs on anachronism: we all know Shakespeare can’t “read” anything now, but Milligan plays dumb on purpose, shrinking four centuries of literary sainthood down to petty professional reciprocity. It’s the comedy of entitlement flipped inside out. Instead of the performer anxiously paying homage to the canon, he demands the canon show up for him.
The subtext is sharper than the throwaway tone suggests. Milligan is needling the whole ritual of respectable culture: the earnest opening quote, the safe invocation of Shakespeare as social proof, the idea that legitimacy trickles down from the dead. By refusing to start with Shakespeare, he’s refusing to audition for seriousness. He’s also defending comedy’s status without saying so outright. If Shakespeare is the benchmark of English wit and humanity, why should the modern comic always be the supplicant? Milligan’s complaint is absurd, but it smuggles in a real grievance: popular humor gets treated as disposable while “great literature” is treated as a permanent credential.
Context matters: Milligan came out of the postwar British tradition where comedy was increasingly anti-authority and allergic to deference. In that world, puncturing the Bard isn’t vandalism; it’s a way of reclaiming oxygen from a culture that too often confuses reverence with taste.
The subtext is sharper than the throwaway tone suggests. Milligan is needling the whole ritual of respectable culture: the earnest opening quote, the safe invocation of Shakespeare as social proof, the idea that legitimacy trickles down from the dead. By refusing to start with Shakespeare, he’s refusing to audition for seriousness. He’s also defending comedy’s status without saying so outright. If Shakespeare is the benchmark of English wit and humanity, why should the modern comic always be the supplicant? Milligan’s complaint is absurd, but it smuggles in a real grievance: popular humor gets treated as disposable while “great literature” is treated as a permanent credential.
Context matters: Milligan came out of the postwar British tradition where comedy was increasingly anti-authority and allergic to deference. In that world, puncturing the Bard isn’t vandalism; it’s a way of reclaiming oxygen from a culture that too often confuses reverence with taste.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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