Time & Perspective Quote by Harry Anderson

It lands like a throwaway talk-show grenade: a clean, almost bureaucratic question that pretends to be civic-minded while daring you to reveal what you really think about sex, morality, and control. Coming from Harry Anderson, an actor best known for a sly, skeptical persona, the line reads less like policy curiosity and more like a performance of provocation. The phrasing matters. "Is now the time" frames legalization as an overdue modernization, the same rhetorical wrapper used for everything from cannabis to marriage equality. It smuggles in the assumption that the arc of history bends toward permissiveness, and that hesitation is just prudish lag.

The subtext is a trapdoor. Ask it in polite company and you instantly force everyone into roles: the libertarian pragmatist, the feminist critic, the law-and-order scold, the public-health realist. It turns a messy, high-stakes issue (exploitation, trafficking, labor rights, stigma, policing) into a single binary moment: yes or no, now or not now. That compression is part of why it "works" as a line for an entertainer. It’s not designed to resolve anything; it’s designed to light up the room and expose the audience’s reflexes.

Culturally, it echoes the late-20th-century American habit of laundering taboo through "debate" language. By choosing the cool, procedural diction of legalization, Anderson can flirt with transgression while keeping plausible deniability: he’s only asking. The question performs daring without owning an answer, which is exactly how showbiz gets to play with society’s nerves and still exit smiling.