Creativity Quote by Allan Sherman

Sherman lands the punchline by yoking two events that should never share a sentence: a sweepstakes win and a fatal car crash. The clash is the point. Both feel random, sensational, and strangely impersonal when they belong to strangers. Success, he suggests, is less a moral reward than a headline you read about someone you will never meet.

As a musician and comedy writer working in the early mass-media age, Sherman understood how fame gets packaged: a few glossy anecdotes, a lucky break, a “discovered” myth that scrubs out the slog. His line skewers that story. By comparing success to a crash, he also exposes the darker underside of aspiration culture: the way we consume other people’s outcomes as entertainment, detached from the human cost. One person’s breakout can be another person’s erasure; both are treated as spectacle.

The subtext is defensive and revealing. Calling success “somebody else’s” is a joke that masks a bruised truth: it’s easier to frame achievement as arbitrary than to sit with envy, disappointment, or the fear that effort won’t matter. The humor isn’t airy; it’s a pressure valve for people who suspect the game is rigged or at least roulette.

What makes it work is Sherman’s deadpan fatalism. He doesn’t romanticize failure or demonize ambition. He simply punctures the comforting narrative that success is predictable, deserved, or even particularly knowable from the outside.