Justice & Law Quote by John Waters

John Waters turns self-promotion into a joke about criminality, which is exactly his brand: the patron saint of tasteful bad taste, grinning while he pokes the culture in its soft spots. The line works because it flatters and insults the audience at the same time. Court TV is framed as a delivery system for attention, not truth, and Waters is “thrilled” to access it the way a savvy hustler might be thrilled to find a new billboard. Then he drops the punchline: the only other route to that captive audience would be as a defendant. Fame, he implies, is increasingly adjacent to infamy, and the public’s appetite for spectacle doesn’t discriminate much between transgression on screen and transgression in court.

The subtext is classic Waters cynicism: American morality is a costume, and our real civic religion is gawking. Court TV’s voyeurism becomes a mirror for the way his films have always functioned - inviting viewers to enjoy what they’re not supposed to enjoy, then daring them to pretend they didn’t. He’s also winking at his own outlaw persona. Waters built a career on aesthetic misdemeanors: drag, filth, suburban perversity, the whole carefully curated delinquency. By joking that a trial is the “only other way,” he admits how the media economy rewards scandal with scale.

Context matters, too. Court TV represents a particular era of televised justice as entertainment, from O.J. onward, where due process becomes content. Waters isn’t lamenting it; he’s exploiting it, with the mischievous honesty of someone who knows the marketplace and refuses to sound noble about it.