Wit & Attitude Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke turns a familiar virtue into a punchline: seriousness, that badge of credibility, is just stupidity with a student ID. The line works because it flatters the reader's suspicion that much of what passes for "grown-up discourse" is performative - not wiser, just better dressed. By routing the insult through "college", he aims it at credentialism and the way institutions can launder bad ideas into respectable ones. You can be wrong in public; you can be wrong with citations; you can be wrong while sounding like you're saving the republic.

The subtext is classic O'Rourke: an allergy to sanctimony, especially the kind that arrives with jargon and moral certainty. "Seriousness" here isn't depth or care; it's the stiff, humorless posture that signals authority. He implies that this posture can be learned - a set of manners, a tone, a vocabulary - and that once you learn it, you can smuggle stupidity past the bouncers. If irony is a truth serum, seriousness is the opposite: a costume that protects the speaker from being laughed out of the room, which is often the only real accountability available.

Context matters because O'Rourke wrote inside an American media ecosystem where punditry and politics reward grave tones over good sense. The joke is a warning: when we treat earnestness as proof, we invite confident nonsense to take the mic. His punchline doesn't argue against thinking hard; it argues against confusing the absence of humor with the presence of intelligence.