Humor & Life Quote by Jackie Mason

The joke lands like a shrug in the middle of a crime scene: of course your life matters less than a lobby check. Jackie Mason frames corruption as basic arithmetic, not melodrama. “More profitable” is the needle. He doesn’t accuse your congressman of being evil; he accuses him of being rational inside a system that rewards the wrong inputs. That’s what makes it sting. The punchline isn’t that politicians are venal. It’s that the market logic is so normalized we can say it out loud and it still feels plausible.

The tobacco industry is the perfect villain because it’s both old-school American business and uniquely indefensible: a product engineered for addiction, sold with decades of denial, padded by legal muscle and campaign donations. Mason is compressing a whole era of late-20th-century cynicism - Big Tobacco hearings, warning labels, surgeon general reports - into one line that treats public health as an inconvenience to the revenue stream.

Subtext-wise, he’s also needling the listener’s self-image. You’re a citizen in theory, a data point in practice. The phrase “your congressman” personalizes the betrayal: not some abstract Washington machine, but the person who shakes your hand at a diner. It’s populism with teeth, and it’s funny because it’s calibrated to the bleak recognition that the incentives are real. Mason isn’t asking you to be shocked; he’s asking you to notice what you’ve been trained to tolerate.