Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Jay Lerner

A compliment gets dressed up, then promptly mugged in the alley. Lerner’s line pretends to offer mercy - “I grant you” - before turning the knife: the problem isn’t just that the thing (a person, a city, a production, an institution) looks bad; it’s that there’s nothing inside worth redeeming. The gag lands because it inverts the expected consolation. We’re trained for “not a pretty face, but a good heart.” Lerner swaps in “an enormous lack of character,” making emptiness sound like a physical organ, something you could weigh. The phrase “enormous lack” is the comic engine: absence treated as a presence, a void with bulk.

As a dramatist, Lerner understood that cruelty can be a form of precision. This isn’t merely an insult; it’s a critique of surfaces and the cultural habit of excusing them with imagined depth. “Flabby exterior” evokes softness, indulgence, the body as metaphor for moral slackness. The subtext is classically theatrical: the world is full of people and projects that coast on presentation, and just as many that rely on the myth that “underneath” there must be substance. Lerner denies that comforting narrative.

Contextually, it fits mid-century Broadway wit: elegant phrasing used to deliver a bruising truth, the kind of line that gets a laugh because it articulates a suspicion the audience already has but rarely hears stated so cleanly. The laugh is recognition - and a little relief at not being the target.