Wit & Attitude Quote by Alan Coren

“Foolproof” is one of those industrial boasts that collapses the moment it meets real life. Alan Coren’s line pricks that puffed-up promise with a single, deliciously petty suspicion: maybe the people selling us certainty secretly employ uncertainty. The joke works because it treats “the fool” not as an abstract worst-case user but as a recurring, payroll-eligible character - a paid saboteur whose only job is to be human.

Coren’s intent is less to dunk on clumsy consumers than to mock the marketing fantasy that design can outwit fallibility. “Foolproof” pretends there’s a clean boundary between competence and idiocy; Coren suggests the boundary is porous, situational, and embarrassingly close to home. The line invites an uncomfortable recognition: everyone becomes the fool when tired, rushed, distracted, or confronted with an interface clearly designed by someone who never had to use it.

Subtextually, it’s also a sly defense of the end user. If something is truly foolproof, it should anticipate not just malice but improvisation: the wrong plug in the wrong socket, the instruction manual ignored on principle, the button that looks decorative but isn’t. Coren, a British humorist with a feel for everyday indignities, taps into late-20th-century consumer culture, where gadgets multiply and “idiot-proof” becomes a substitute for clarity. The punchline is capitalism’s little secret: the fool isn’t an outlier. He’s the market.