Time & Perspective Quote by David Cross

Comedy, in David Cross's framing, isn’t a faucet you turn on; it’s a record you keep. That shift from performance to “document” is doing a lot of work. It quietly rejects the sweaty, compulsive expectation that comedians exist to manufacture laughs on demand, as if humor were a customer service metric. Cross is pointing to something closer to reportage: you observe, you catalogue, you leave receipts. If it’s funny, it’s because the world is.

The word “hopefully” is the tell. It’s a hedge, but also a dare. Cross isn’t promising punchlines; he’s promising intent, perspective, and a willingness to show the unflattering angles. That’s a very Cross move: comedy as a byproduct of telling the truth too plainly, or too long, or too specifically, until the audience recognizes the absurdity they’ve been trained to ignore. The laughs become a kind of collateral damage.

Context matters: Cross comes out of alt-comedy and political satire, where “being funny” often competes with being accurate, furious, or morally awake. Calling the work a document aligns him with the comedian-as-critic tradition - not a clown, a witness. It also protects the material from the tyranny of likeability. If the goal is constant humor, you sand down the sharpness. If the goal is documentation, you can let the uncomfortable parts breathe, and trust that humor will surface as recognition: “Yes, that’s exactly how it is.”

The subtext is almost an ethics statement: don’t confuse jokes with meaning. The joke is the sugar; the document is the diagnosis.