Humor & Life Quote by Fanny Brice

Brice’s line has the snap of vaudeville truth: romance, she’s suggesting, isn’t a sacred bond so much as a ticketed performance where the hardest-to-get actor draws the biggest crowd. “Frigid” is intentionally provocative, a period insult that frames women’s desire as a problem to be solved. Brice flips it into strategy. The supposedly cold woman isn’t broken; she’s a skilled showrunner, controlling pacing, suspense, and access. Men “fall” not because they’ve found depth, but because they’ve been sold anticipation.

The intent is comic, but the subtext is steelier. Brice is pointing at the male ego’s dependence on pursuit: if affection comes too easily, it reads as cheap; if it’s rationed, it becomes valuable. That’s not a love story, it’s a market. “Best show” is doing double duty, nodding to her own world where audience attention is the commodity and withholding is a craft. Desire is staged; rejection is choreography.

Context matters. Brice built fame in the Ziegfeld-era entertainment machine, where women were expected to be spectacle while navigating brutal double standards. Her joke smuggles in a critique: men reward women who perform scarcity, then punish them with labels like “frigid” for the very aloofness that keeps men interested. The line lands because it’s both cynical and self-aware, a comedian admitting that in a culture of conquest and display, sincerity is rarely the most profitable act.