Life & Wisdom Quote by Boris Vian

A line like this lands with a wince because it’s engineered to. Vian, the jazz-soaked French polymath who loved American music and loathed bourgeois hypocrisy, drops a phrase that sounds like a casual confession of racism and then forces you to sit with the ugliness of the posture behind it: the “of course” that presumes a shared complicity, the “fun” that reduces people to an amusement, the preposition “with” that pretends equality while keeping control. It’s bait.

The intent isn’t to endorse the sentiment so much as to expose a particular mid-century French way of consuming Blackness: jazz as nightlife thrill, Black artists as exotic proof of one’s modernity, all while actual Black people remain outside the circle of social and political regard. Vian came out of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres scene where jazz signaled sophistication and rebellion; that scene could be genuinely admiring and still structurally patronizing. The line compresses that contradiction into a single, ugly little pleasure statement.

Subtext: the speaker isn’t proud of prejudice; he’s proud of his supposed open-mindedness. “I’m not like those other racists,” he implies, “I play.” That’s the dagger. Vian’s satire often works by letting a voice indict itself, adopting the cadence of polite society and turning it into self-portrait. Read this way, the quote is less a slogan than a trapdoor: you laugh, then realize what kind of laughter it’s asking you to share - and what that says about the room.