Wit & Attitude Quote by Jean Shepherd

Shepherd aims his dart at the bureaucrat as a type: not evil, not even flamboyantly stupid, just professionally blind. The “Cost and Accounting Department” isn’t a literal room so much as a cultural habitat where a white collar doubles as a moral credential. Clean-shaven, pressed, compliant-looking, these men embody postwar America’s faith that systems and spreadsheets can launder human mess into something “reasonable.” Shepherd’s bite is that their respectability isn’t neutral; it’s a weapon.

The line turns on an asymmetry of ridicule. They “can’t see a damn thing ridiculous about themselves,” not because they lack humor, but because their self-image is reinforced by institutional power. They’ve outsourced self-critique to procedure. If you don’t fit the template, you become the joke. The subtext is social control: mockery polices the boundaries of the normal, and the bureaucracy gets to define “normal” by default. Shepherd isn’t romanticizing the outsider, either; he’s warning how quickly the nonconforming person gets reclassified as an error term.

Context matters: Shepherd’s work thrived on mid-century American textures, where corporate rationality and suburban propriety were sold as adulthood itself. His profanity (“damn”) punctures the polite surface he’s describing, a small rebellion against the sanitized language of offices. It’s also a comedic move with teeth: the fun is in watching the supposedly sober professionals revealed as absurd, not despite their seriousness, but because of it. Their greatest gag is that they don’t know they’re performing one.