Wit & Attitude Quote by Rita Rudner

Rita Rudner flips a tired, sexist assumption with the clean efficiency of a stage magician: distract with the familiar insult, then reveal the real target. The setup borrows a classic misogynist trope - the idea that a woman's body signals her intellect, as if anatomy were a résumé. But the punchline reroutes stupidity away from women and onto the men doing the judging. It's not just a reversal; it's an accusation about who gets to be the evaluator in the first place.

The joke works because it weaponizes the male gaze against itself. Large breasts are treated, culturally, as a kind of public stimulus, something men are expected to react to and women are expected to manage. Rudner's subtext is that "stupidity" isn't lodged in women's bodies but in men's entitlement to read those bodies as information, invitation, or distraction. The line lands with extra bite because it mimics the logic of objectification - reducing people to parts - then exposes how that reduction short-circuits male self-control and judgment. If men become "stupid", it's because they're choosing to surrender agency while blaming women for the consequences.

In the context of mainstream stand-up, Rudner is also doing a canny bit of cultural judo. She acknowledges the reality that women's bodies are constantly policed and interpreted, then turns that surveillance into a liability for the surveillers. It's flirtation with teeth: a laugh that lets the room release tension while quietly indicting the social script that created it.