Humor & Life Quote by David Letterman

Letterman’s joke works because it treats “official” as the flimsiest substance in politics: not a filing, not a platform, just a headline everyone agrees to repeat. The first sentence mimics the authoritative cadence of campaign news, the kind that wants you to believe an election is already a TV season with its cast locked. Then he yanks the rug with that second line - “at least that’s what everybody thinks he said” - turning certainty into a group hallucination.

The target isn’t Schwarzenegger’s accent so much as the media’s eagerness to translate celebrity into governance. During the 2003 California recall circus, the state’s crisis got packaged as entertainment, and the public learned about candidates the same way they learned about movie releases: through buzz. Letterman compresses that dynamic into one punchline. “Everybody thinks” is doing real work: it’s consensus without comprehension, a reminder that news can be a telephone game where confidence rises as accuracy drops.

There’s also a sly bit of cultural power inversion. Arnold, the blockbuster import, becomes a political oracle whose words don’t need to be understood - they just need to be believed. The joke flatters the audience’s skepticism while indicting their complicity: we’re laughing at the press for rushing to declare something “official,” but we’re also the ones who keep the hype machine fed. In Letterman’s world, democracy doesn’t collapse under tyranny; it slips on a banana peel of misheard soundbites.