Humor & Life Quote by Norman Wisdom

Norman Wisdom’s genius was always that he could look like he’d wandered in from the street and still somehow expose the machinery of adulthood. So when he says, “I’m still constantly thinking of ideas. I don’t feel 90. I think I’m about 12,” he’s not just doing the cute old-man-doesn’t-feel-old routine. He’s defending the comic worldview as a kind of permanent apprenticeship: curiosity first, dignity second.

“Constantly thinking of ideas” is the workmanlike phrase that keeps the sentiment from floating off into inspiration-poster fluff. Wisdom frames creativity as a habit, almost a compulsion, and that matters because his screen persona was built on relentless problem-solving: the eager bumbler who keeps trying, keeps failing, keeps going. The “12” isn’t nostalgia; it’s a strategic claim about where comedy lives. Twelve is pre-credential, pre-prestige, pre-self-protection. It’s the age when embarrassment is survivable and questions are still asked out loud.

There’s subtext, too, about the indignities of being “90” in public: the expectation that age should bring gravitas, stillness, tasteful retrospection. Wisdom politely refuses that script. Coming from a performer whose appeal crossed class lines and even political systems (he was famously beloved by Charlie Chaplin and popular in places like Albania), the line also reads as a subtle manifesto: the clown stays young because the clown’s job is to keep puncturing the grown-ups’ certainty. The punchline isn’t that he feels young. It’s that he never agreed to become old in the first place.