Humor & Life Quote by Jennifer Saunders

Comedy lives on the edge of bad ideas that turn out to be perfect. Jennifer Saunders is talking about the kind of creative “liberty” that isn’t polite revision so much as a gleeful refusal to behave. The line has the breezy, behind-the-scenes candor of a comedian admitting that the best choices often start as a dare: the idea was “so good” it demanded to be done, regardless of realism, continuity, or whatever the tasteful people in the room were advising.

The Patsy detail is the tell. “I wish we’d just gone with the idea that Patsy had been a man” isn’t just a punchy alternative plot point; it’s Saunders clocking how much of comedy’s power comes from detonating the audience’s assumptions about gender, glamor, and identity. Patsy (as a type: the hard-partying, image-obsessed woman) already satirizes femininity as performance. Making her “have been a man” would turn that satire into something sharper: not a moral lesson, but a license to expose how arbitrary the rules are, how much of “womanhood” in that world is costume, affect, and survival strategy.

The subtext is also a little self-roast. Saunders knows the show’s brilliance often came from going too far, then acting like it was inevitable. “Fantastic” lands because it’s both sincere and faintly wicked: a recognition that the funniest versions of characters are the ones that refuse to be stable, respectable, or easily categorized.