Humor & Life Quote by Fred Allen

Fred Allen’s jab lands because it disguises a highbrow complaint as a throwaway pun. “Medium” is doing triple duty: television as a communications medium, “medium” as merely middling, and “medium” as the spiritualist who channels voices from elsewhere. Allen implies TV is all three at once: a pipeline, an aesthetic compromise, and a séance for secondhand ideas. The punchline - “because anything well done is rare” - is the knife twist. He’s not claiming television can’t do greatness; he’s claiming the system is engineered to make greatness statistically unlikely.

The intent is less technophobia than standards-policing. Allen came up in radio and vaudeville, arenas where timing and craft were visible and failure was immediate. Early television (and its sponsor-driven, schedule-churning machinery) rewarded volume, novelty, and safe repetition. His line treats “well done” like a scarce resource in an attention economy: when airtime is endless, discipline becomes optional, and optional discipline becomes endangered.

The subtext is also status anxiety: TV as the new mass monarch dethroning older forms and flattening taste. Allen’s cynicism isn’t snobbery for its own sake; it’s a warning about incentives. If you build a culture around filling hours rather than earning minutes, you don’t get more art - you get more content. The joke survives because it names a feeling that keeps resurfacing with every new platform: abundance doesn’t automatically produce excellence; it often just makes excellence harder to notice.