Faith & Spirit Quote by Tracey Ullman

Fame isn’t framed here as glamour; it’s framed as a neurological weather system. Tracey Ullman’s line lands because it’s observational comedy disguised as a cautionary report: she’s not marveling at Paul McCartney’s talent, she’s clocking the psychic side effects of being endlessly mirrored back as myth. “Treated like a god” is doing the heavy lifting - not “admired,” not “celebrated,” but deified, the kind of attention that doesn’t just inflate ego, it rewires reality. And Ullman’s “for a while” quietly asserts credibility without sounding starstruck: she was close enough to witness the damage, distant enough to stay sane.

The subtext is less about McCartney personally than the machinery around him. A god requires a clergy: handlers, fans, press, industry people whose livelihoods depend on maintaining the illusion. Over “twenty years,” that devotion becomes a feedback loop where ordinary friction - being told no, being wrong, being average on a bad day - gets edited out. Ullman’s comic bite is the understatement of “what it does to you,” as if she’s describing a minor occupational hazard rather than a slow erosion of normal human calibration.

Context matters: Ullman comes from a tradition of performance that feeds on social observation and deflation. Pairing a comedian’s eye with a Beatle-sized subject lets her puncture the romance of celebrity without cruelty. It’s envy-proof. The joke isn’t “McCartney’s weird,” it’s “anyone would be weird after that.”