Aging & Wisdom Quote by Steve Coogan

Coogan is doing that very comedian’s trick of making you laugh and then making you wince because you recognize yourself in the punchline. “Regurgitate” is a deliberately gross verb: it turns cultural repetition into something bodily, automatic, and a little shameful. He’s not just annoyed by cliches; he’s diagnosing a social habit where language stops being a tool for thinking and becomes a pre-packaged substitute for it.

The “photocopy of a photocopy” image is doing heavy work. It’s not merely “unoriginal” versus “original.” It’s about degradation through repetition: each pass flattens detail, drains contrast, and smudges whatever once had texture. The killer qualifier is “vaguely interesting.” Coogan concedes that the source material might have had a spark, but it’s already secondhand by the time most people repeat it. That’s the subtext: we’re often not borrowing from insight, we’re borrowing from the memory of insight.

Context matters because Coogan’s comedy, especially in work like Alan Partridge, thrives on the horror of prefabricated speech. Partridge is practically built out of catchphrases and received wisdom, a man trying to sound authoritative while revealing how little he’s actually saying. In that light, the quote reads less like snobbery and more like a warning about cultural entropy: when everyone speaks in templates, nobody risks a real thought. The joke lands because it’s true, and because it implicates the audience without preaching.