Politics & Power Quote by Woody Allen

Woody Allen lands the joke with a ledger and a stapler, dragging the mythic menace of organized crime down into the fluorescent-lit banality of business. The first clause is pure intimidation: forty billion dollars a year is the kind of figure that usually arrives with gravitas, policy panic, and a Senate hearing. Then he punctures it with an accountant's afterthought: "very little on office supplies". The laugh comes from the collision of scales. A vast, violent underworld gets reframed as a cost-efficient enterprise, the sort that would impress a manager tasked with trimming overhead.

The subtext is Allen's familiar urban cynicism: America doesn't just tolerate criminality, it admires competence. By borrowing the language of corporate frugality, he blurs the line between the mob and legitimate capitalism, implying that the difference is less moral than procedural. It's not that organized crime is uniquely alien; it's that it's organized. The punchline quietly mocks our cultural reflex to treat money as the ultimate credential. If the numbers are big enough, even brutality can sound like "revenue."

Context matters: Allen's comedy emerged in an era when the Mafia was both tabloid spectacle and pop mythology, a parallel institution that looked, uncomfortably, like a shadow corporation. The office-supplies gag is also a dig at middle-class respectability: while ordinary workers drown in paperwork and petty expenses, the criminals are the ones running the lean operation. The joke isn't just about crime; it's about what America calls success.