Politics & Power Quote by Eddie Izzard

Izzard’s joke works because it yanks “shock” out from under polite society and replaces it with a brutal ledger of scale. The punchline isn’t the Clinton scandal; it’s the selective innocence that let people treat a president’s sex lie as a moral emergency while filing away centuries of state deception toward Native Americans as distant, regrettable “history.” By setting those two lies side by side, Izzard exposes a cultural reflex: outrage is often proportional not to harm, but to proximity, salaciousness, and media convenience.

The intent is less to litigate Clinton than to indict the audience’s calibration. “Everyone was surprised!” lands as mock disbelief, a spotlight on the performative pearl-clutching of the late-1990s news cycle. The line “A little naive, I feel!” is doing double duty: it’s self-deprecating in form, accusatory in function. Izzard pretends to merely “feel” something while actually calling the public willfully ignorant.

The subtext is about national storytelling. America prefers its big lies museumed and euphemized, parceled into textbooks and commemorations, while small lies get treated like character tests that can be endlessly televised. That contrast flatters contemporary institutions: it implies we’re “past” foundational betrayals, so we can obsess over personal morality as if it’s the real measure of governance.

Context matters: post-impeachment, when cable news turned politics into a morality play. Izzard punctures that genre with a comedian’s scalpel, reminding you that the biggest scandal is often the one we’ve normalized.