Time & Perspective Quote by Johnny Carson

Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas is Carson at his most elegant: a wholesome seasonal reminder flipped into a deadpan indictment of institutional incompetence. The joke works because it keeps the familiar rhythm of public-service advice (plan ahead, be considerate, beat the rush) while swapping in the thing everyone privately suspects will happen anyway. The punchline isnt just that the mail gets lost; its that weve all adjusted our behavior around that expectation, treating failure as part of the calendar.

Carson’s intent is less to roast postal workers than to give viewers permission to admit an annoyance without sounding mean. In the late 20th-century America he hosted nightly, the post office was a civic fixture: dependable in theory, bureaucratic in practice, and especially during the holidays, a stress-test for national patience. By aiming at the system rather than an individual, the line lets the audience bond over a shared, low-stakes grievance. Its consumer culture with a wink: we buy, we ship, we hope, we complain, we repeat.

The subtext is sharper than it looks. Christmas is supposed to be the season of goodwill, but logistics and bureaucracy turn it into a parade of tracking numbers and quiet resentment. Carson punctures the sentimentality without rejecting it. You can still want to send the gift; you just cant pretend the machinery of modern life is built for miracles. That tension - between cheer and dysfunction - is exactly where his comedy lived.