Success Quote by Robert Klein

Klein’s line is a perfect snapshot of midcentury male desire colliding with the absurd machinery of the American imagination. He starts with the classic, half-confessional setup: the teenage dream of finally touching a naked woman. Then he sabotages it. The woman “turn[s] to bronze,” instantly swapping flesh for monument, heat for cold permanence. It’s funny because it’s so cruelly specific: not just “it didn’t work,” but desire petrified into a museum object. The gag hints at how the fifties sold sex as both omnipresent (in advertising, pinups, winking innuendo) and inaccessible (in lived, policed reality). The dream’s payoff becomes a statue: safe, admired, untouchable.

Then Klein sprints into the second image, hot dogs chasing donuts through the Lincoln Tunnel, a cinematic idiocy that reads like a cartoon of appetite and anxiety. Food becomes libido by other means - rounded, phallic, sugary, salty - but also distinctly American, processed, and in motion. The Lincoln Tunnel detail matters: a cramped, iconic passage between New Jersey and Manhattan, a conduit of commuter masculinity and urban ambition. He’s not dreaming in pastoral symbols; he’s dreaming in infrastructure and snack foods.

The intent isn’t to confess erotic yearning so much as to mock the era’s wiring: desire rerouted into consumer kitsch and public monuments. Klein’s comedy works by yanking libido out of the bedroom and dropping it into the national landscape, where even fantasies have traffic patterns and brand-name calories.