Wit & Attitude Quote by Joseph Barbera

Publicity, in Barbera's telling, is a drug with a payroll. The line moves in tight, rhythmic beats - want, need, crave - like a character accelerating down a Hanna-Barbera hallway, legs spinning before the body commits. That escalation is the point: attention doesn’t simply accompany creative work; it rewires the creator’s nervous system. The punch lands in the last clause, where the glamour of being seen flips into the terror of being ignored. It’s not fame as victory, but fame as a maintenance problem.

The intent is bluntly diagnostic. Barbera isn’t moralizing about vanity so much as describing an ecosystem where visibility equals oxygen. In mid-century American entertainment, especially animation, you weren’t selling a single artwork; you were selling a pipeline: characters, merchandise, syndication, network relationships. Publicity keeps the machine funded and the studio alive. So the craving is partly personal, partly industrial. You learn to desire what your livelihood depends on.

The subtext carries a cartoonist’s dark comedy: the audience’s affection is fickle, and trends change without apology. One day you’re the soundtrack of childhood; the next you’re a rerun, then a memory, then a licensing asset someone else controls. "Scared as hell" is the rare unsmoothed phrase here, suggesting he’s talking from experience - the anxiety of a creator who knows that silence isn’t neutral. It’s unemployment, irrelevance, and the unsettling question of whether the work mattered without the noise around it.