"Not once in six years did I make it to the office by 9 on the dot"
About this Quote
A line like this lands because it’s both confession and flex: Joseph Barbera admits to chronic lateness while quietly implying that punctuality was never the point of his work. Coming from a cartoonist who helped industrialize TV animation, the subtext isn’t “I was irresponsible,” it’s “the product mattered more than the ritual.” In a medium built on deadlines, pipelines, and painstaking repetition, the idea that a key creator didn’t show up “by 9 on the dot” punctures the corporate fantasy that creativity can be time-clocked into existence.
The phrasing does a lot of sly work. “Not once” is comic exaggeration with a hint of vaudeville timing; “six years” is the receipt; “on the dot” mimics the boss’s language, the petty tyranny of the minute hand. Barbera frames punctuality as a kind of bureaucratic superstition, an external metric that doesn’t map cleanly onto imaginative labor. It’s also an old studio-world anecdote: the successful artist who can get away with behavior that would sink anyone else, because the machine is ultimately organized around output and audience, not attendance.
Context matters here: mid-century animation was a grind, and Hanna-Barbera’s breakthrough was making that grind scalable for television. The quote reads like a small rebellion against the very factory logic he helped perfect, a reminder that even in an assembly line of drawings, the culture still runs on personalities, leverage, and the tacit permission granted to the people who make the thing work.
The phrasing does a lot of sly work. “Not once” is comic exaggeration with a hint of vaudeville timing; “six years” is the receipt; “on the dot” mimics the boss’s language, the petty tyranny of the minute hand. Barbera frames punctuality as a kind of bureaucratic superstition, an external metric that doesn’t map cleanly onto imaginative labor. It’s also an old studio-world anecdote: the successful artist who can get away with behavior that would sink anyone else, because the machine is ultimately organized around output and audience, not attendance.
Context matters here: mid-century animation was a grind, and Hanna-Barbera’s breakthrough was making that grind scalable for television. The quote reads like a small rebellion against the very factory logic he helped perfect, a reminder that even in an assembly line of drawings, the culture still runs on personalities, leverage, and the tacit permission granted to the people who make the thing work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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