Success Quote by Joel McHale

McHale’s line lands because it punctures the most public lie in entertainment: that the spotlight is the point. Coming from a comedian whose brand has long involved standing adjacent to fame (hosting gigs, red carpets, TV hits) while also mocking it, the denial reads less like sanctimony and more like a survival tactic. He’s not pretending fame doesn’t matter; he’s insisting it’s a lousy organizing principle for a life.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Definitely not” is the kind of emphatic, conversational self-correction that signals he’s heard the question a thousand times and resents what it implies about him. Then he reframes fame as a goal with no content: “for the sake of having fame.” That tautology is the critique. If your ambition is pure visibility, you’ve replaced craft with metrics, and the metric never stops demanding more.

The subtext is about control and dignity in an economy that rewards attention over competence. For comedians especially, “famous” can mean being legible as a meme before being respected as a worker. McHale is drawing a boundary between fame as a byproduct (useful, monetizable, occasionally inevitable) and fame as identity (fragile, externally owned, easy to lose). Calling it “horrible” isn’t moral posturing; it’s an acknowledgment that chasing applause as a lifestyle corrodes the thing that gets applause in the first place: taste, perspective, and the willingness to risk being unpopular for a good joke.