Daily Inspiration Quote by George S. Kaufman

Kaufman’s line snaps like a rimshot: it’s a joke about deadlines that doubles as a mini-manifesto about how easily “satire” gets domesticated by show business. “Satire is what closes on Saturday night” sounds at first like a vaudeville wisecrack, the kind you toss off backstage. The barb is that satire, in practice, often isn’t a noble genre so much as a fragile commercial product. If it can’t keep seats filled through the weekend, it isn’t “courageous” or “misunderstood” - it’s simply closing.

The specific intent is to puncture pretension. Kaufman, a Broadway craftsman with a reporter’s nose for hypocrisy, is yanking satire down from the pedestal and putting it on the balance sheet. Subtext: audiences claim to want truth-telling, but they buy tickets for pleasure, reassurance, and the flattering illusion of sophistication. Satire asks them to laugh at themselves or their tribe; when the laugh gets too sharp, the box office gets dull.

Context matters: Kaufman worked in an era when theater and popular press were mass entertainment with immediate market feedback, not the slow-burn prestige economy of literary culture. The “Saturday night” detail is doing heavy lifting: Saturday is peak business, the moment a show either proves it can thrive with the biggest crowd or reveals it’s preaching to a thin, weekday choir.

It’s cynical, but not merely bleak. Kaufman is also implying a craft lesson: effective satire has to seduce before it can sting. If you can’t keep them through Saturday, your moral clarity is just bad showmanship.