War & Peace Quote by Tim Meadows

The punch in Tim Meadows's line is the brutal mismatch between the tidy bureaucratic category of "arrested" and everything that can happen to you before the paperwork ever starts. He opens with a clean, almost braggy denial - I've never been arrested - the kind of credential people cite as proof of innocence, respectability, safety. Then he yanks the rug out: stopped, searched, gun to my head. The escalation is so extreme it turns the first sentence into an indictment of the whole premise. If you can be treated like a suspect at gunpoint and still technically count as "never arrested", the metric isn't measuring morality; it's measuring what the state bothered to record.

As a comedian, Meadows isn't pleading a case so much as exposing a cultural lie with timing. The list structure is classic stand-up mechanics - three beats, each sharper than the last - but the laugh, if it comes, is nervous. The joke isn't that cops are scary; it's that "clean record" language can coexist with terror, and that many audiences only recognize police violence when it's attached to a famous person saying it plainly.

Dropping "Chicago cops" isn't incidental. It plants the story in a city with a long, documented history of aggressive policing and scandal, where "stop and frisk" isn't just policy talk, it's lived choreography. Meadows's subtext is pointed: you don't need to be guilty, or even detained, to be punished. You just need to be available.