"Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died"
About this Quote
Ustinov’s line lands like a compliment to comedy and a slap to society: if snobbery vanished, humor would lose one of its most reliable engines. Coming from an actor who made a career out of observing human vanity at close range, it’s less a gloomy prediction than a wry admission of what audiences love to watch - not just people failing, but people failing while insisting they’re superior.
The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a joke about how much material snobs provide: the pretensions, the coded language, the petty hierarchies of taste. Underneath, it’s a diagnosis of laughter’s dependence on status. We don’t only laugh because something is surprising; we laugh because it punctures a social performance. Snobbery is inherently performative: it requires an audience to impress and someone else to exclude. That makes it theatrically perfect. The snob is always “acting,” which means the actor (and the viewer) gets to catch them in the gap between who they are and who they’re trying to appear to be.
The subtext also implicates the listener. If comedy needs snobbery, then audiences are complicit in keeping it alive - at least as a spectacle. We pay for the privilege of watching arrogance get corrected. There’s even a faint melancholy behind the wit: a world without snobbery might be fairer, but it might also be less dramatically legible, with fewer absurd masks to pull off.
Contextually, Ustinov’s cosmopolitan, class-conscious 20th-century milieu matters: Britain’s etiquette, Europe’s old-world distinctions, show business’s new ones. Snobbery mutates; laughter follows it like a shadow.
The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a joke about how much material snobs provide: the pretensions, the coded language, the petty hierarchies of taste. Underneath, it’s a diagnosis of laughter’s dependence on status. We don’t only laugh because something is surprising; we laugh because it punctures a social performance. Snobbery is inherently performative: it requires an audience to impress and someone else to exclude. That makes it theatrically perfect. The snob is always “acting,” which means the actor (and the viewer) gets to catch them in the gap between who they are and who they’re trying to appear to be.
The subtext also implicates the listener. If comedy needs snobbery, then audiences are complicit in keeping it alive - at least as a spectacle. We pay for the privilege of watching arrogance get corrected. There’s even a faint melancholy behind the wit: a world without snobbery might be fairer, but it might also be less dramatically legible, with fewer absurd masks to pull off.
Contextually, Ustinov’s cosmopolitan, class-conscious 20th-century milieu matters: Britain’s etiquette, Europe’s old-world distinctions, show business’s new ones. Snobbery mutates; laughter follows it like a shadow.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|
More Quotes by Peter
Add to List
