Time & Perspective Quote by Howard Koch

A throwaway riddle that doubles as a pressure test: are you paying attention to the world, or hiding in the movies?

Howard Koch, one of Casablanca's key architects, uses the line to smuggle geopolitics into banter. On the surface it’s a goofy time-zone question, the kind of small talk you’d expect in a cafe where everyone is pretending not to be desperate. But the date isn’t incidental. December 1941 is Pearl Harbor, the moment New York stops being a distant idea and becomes the nerve center of a newly committed America. The joke is that you can’t answer it cleanly. The literal time difference is knowable; the moral time difference isn’t. Casablanca, the city, is stuck in a limbo of visas, bribes, and stalled lives. New York, in the American imagination, is forward motion: industry, certainty, the next act.

That tension is exactly what makes the line work. It’s comic misdirection masking a grim reality: in wartime, “what time is it” becomes “what side are you on” and “how long do we have.” Koch’s screenwriting is doing what the best studio-era dialogue often did under censorship and propaganda demands: keeping the surface sparkling while the subtext clenches. You laugh, then you realize the calendar has teeth. The question isn’t really about clocks; it’s about whether neutrality is still a believable pose when history has already changed the time.