Wealth & Money Quote by Rita Rudner

The joke lands because it treats moral failure as a luxury good. Rita Rudner starts with the tidy, socially acceptable wish - “Someday I want to be rich” - then swerves into the darker headline we all recognize: extreme wealth can corrode empathy. Instead of condemning that rot, she claims it as an aspiration. The punchline is an inversion of the usual redemption arc; we expect self-awareness to lead to virtue, but Rudner uses self-awareness to double down.

Her intent isn’t to confess sociopathy. It’s to mock the culture that treats wealth as an all-purpose scoreboard, so powerful it can swallow basic decency without lowering anyone’s status. The subtext is that “respect for humanity” is often framed as optional once you’ve crossed a certain income bracket - a quaint hobby for people who still need other people. By saying that’s “how rich” she wants to be, Rudner exposes how ridiculous the worship becomes when you state its implications out loud.

There’s also a sly dig at the fantasy of immunity. Rich, in this framing, doesn’t just mean comfort; it means exemption from social consequences, from having to care, from being accountable to the messy fact of other lives. Coming from a stand-up comic, the line fits a late-20th-century American sensibility: money as aspiration, cynicism as realism, and humor as the only polite way to call it what it is. The laughter is recognition - not that we want to be monsters, but that we’ve been trained to admire the monster’s penthouse.