Faith & Spirit Quote by Sam Levenson

Levenson’s joke lands because it flatters chaos while skewering a very specific kind of adult: the person who mistakes taste for virtue and deliberation for intelligence. The rainbow is nature’s accidental masterpiece, a phenomenon that doesn’t ask permission, doesn’t workshop a palette, doesn’t trend-test its hues. Drop a “decorator” into that scene and the miracle gets stuck in committee, paralyzed by preference.

The line is built on a tidy reversal. We’re trained to think design improves things, that expertise refines the raw. Levenson flips it: aesthetic authority becomes the obstacle, not the solution. The punch is the imagined interminability of “still be picking colors,” a jab at perfectionism that’s really about control. If the decorator can’t finalize the rainbow, then the problem isn’t the rainbow; it’s the anxious need to curate it.

There’s also a sly theological subtext. By casting God as the decisive artist and the decorator as the dithering consultant, Levenson gives divinity a very human advantage: the ability to commit. Creation, in this view, isn’t just power; it’s taste without insecurity.

Context matters: mid-century American humor loved puncturing pretension, especially the new consumer class where “good taste” became a status project. Levenson, a family comedian with a sharp eye for domestic absurdity, targets the creeping professionalization of everyday life: the idea that even wonder needs a credential. The rainbow wins because it refuses to be improved.