"In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking but now, God knows, anything goes"
About this Quote
Porter lands the joke with a vaudeville snap: take one prim, buttoned-up image (a flashed stocking) and slam it into the modern free-for-all, then shrug - "God knows" - like even the narrator can barely keep up. The line works because it sounds breezy while quietly cataloging cultural whiplash. Stockings aren’t really the point; they’re a shorthand for how quickly societies redraw the boundary between "decent" and "depraved", and how arbitrary those lines look in hindsight.
As a composer writing for Broadway and high society, Porter had a front-row seat to America’s on-off romance with permissiveness: the Roaring Twenties, the crackdowns, the wartime moral tightening, the postwar loosening. His lyric is engineered to be singable in mixed company - naughty enough to sparkle, clean enough to pass the censor. That balancing act is the subtext. "Anything goes" is both celebration and diagnosis: liberation as a party slogan, but also a wink at the emptiness behind constant novelty. If everything is allowed, nothing shocks; if nothing shocks, what sells?
The invocation of God is doing double duty. It’s mock piety (a safe alibi for saying the risqué part out loud) and a little moral vertigo, as if the speed of change demands a higher authority to even narrate it. Porter makes modernity feel like a runaway chorus line: glamorous, funny, slightly terrifying, and impossible to stop.
As a composer writing for Broadway and high society, Porter had a front-row seat to America’s on-off romance with permissiveness: the Roaring Twenties, the crackdowns, the wartime moral tightening, the postwar loosening. His lyric is engineered to be singable in mixed company - naughty enough to sparkle, clean enough to pass the censor. That balancing act is the subtext. "Anything goes" is both celebration and diagnosis: liberation as a party slogan, but also a wink at the emptiness behind constant novelty. If everything is allowed, nothing shocks; if nothing shocks, what sells?
The invocation of God is doing double duty. It’s mock piety (a safe alibi for saying the risqué part out loud) and a little moral vertigo, as if the speed of change demands a higher authority to even narrate it. Porter makes modernity feel like a runaway chorus line: glamorous, funny, slightly terrifying, and impossible to stop.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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