Love & Passion Quote by Hermione Gingold

Gingold tosses off a line that sounds like a cocktail-party aphorism, then quietly turns it into a worldview. “Sex and laughter” is an old pairing in theory but still mildly scandalous in practice; she treats it as obvious, almost domestic, as if intimacy without humor is just bad craft. Coming from an actress who made a career out of sharp-edged charm and seasoned self-mockery, the joke isn’t merely that the two “go well together” but that they’re competing necessities. She frames the question like a flirtation and lands it like a critique of seriousness.

The dash-heavy cadence matters: “I wondered - and I still do -” signals a mind that refuses closure. It’s not a punchline; it’s an ongoing argument with moral hierarchies that insist sex must be either sacred or shameful, while laughter gets quarantined as lightweight. Gingold smuggles in a more pragmatic scale of value: what keeps you alive, what keeps you human, what keeps you from becoming ridiculous in the wrong way.

There’s also the performer’s subtext: onstage and off, laughter is social power. It disarms, bonds, protects. Sex can be private, destabilizing, freighted with age and expectation; laughter is portable, a tool you can still wield when desire changes or the room turns cold. The line’s sly brilliance is that it refuses to choose while hinting she already has: laughter is the durable pleasure, sex the volatile one, and the happiest life is where they collude.