Daily Inspiration Quote by Joel Hodgson

Joel Hodgson’s line lands like a casual shrug, but it’s really a tidy little defense of the bit. As an entertainer best known for cultivating a deadpan relationship with genre fiction (and the people who take it too seriously), he’s pointing at a recurring media reflex: the urge to turn a show’s premise into a literal world, then hold its creator accountable for that world’s internal geography. “I would always deny it” isn’t just trivia about old interviews; it’s a deliberate refusal to let press coverage flatten a playful framing device into canon.

The joke hinges on the tension between marketing and mischief. A sci-fi set-up like “the year 3000” is catnip for headlines and easy copy, a quick way to signal futurism. Hodgson’s denial is a way of reclaiming authorship from the promotional machine. It says: don’t mistake the wrapper for the candy. The show is less prophecy than pretext, a stage for riffing, not world-building.

There’s also a quiet jab at fandom’s courtroom instincts. By stressing that he “always” denied it, Hodgson is preemptively rebutting the inevitable “gotcha” compilation, the archival impulse that treats old press as sworn testimony. Subtext: the fun is in the artificiality. If the setting is “the future,” it’s because the future is a useful distance - far enough away to make the present look strange, close enough to keep the punchlines legible.