Politics & Power Quote by Marty Feldman

The joke lands because it dresses moral seriousness in a cheap tux and then immediately pantses it. Feldman starts with the familiar ethical posture of the conscientious modern eater: a principled line drawn at "intelligent life". It sounds like the tidy kind of compassion that plays well at dinner parties. Then he yanks the premise into a darker, gleefully antisocial punchline: if intelligence is the criterion, network executives and politicians are not just fair game, they're appetizers.

The subtext is a two-pronged insult. First, it skewers sanctimony. The initial clause parodies moral purity as a consumer choice, suggesting that many ethical stances are less about changing systems than about polishing the self. Second, it targets power. By naming the gatekeepers of television and the architects of public life, Feldman taps a specifically late-20th-century frustration: institutions that claim to serve the public while treating people as data points, demographics, votes.

As a comedian who thrived in the British satirical boom and the absurdist sensibility of the era, Feldman uses cannibalism as cartoon violence - a harmless way to express a very real appetite for accountability. The line also flatters the audience with complicity: you are meant to laugh because you've felt the same fury, sanitized into a one-liner. It's not just a gag about diet; it's a cynical little protest against the people who package reality and the people who run it.