Life & Wisdom Quote by Alan Coren

Coren’s joke lands because it treats a bleak social truth as a perfectly reasonable design feature. Of course the TV sits in the prized spot of the living room; if humans were genuinely more compelling, we’d display them the way we display the screen. The punchline is the absurd image of a person stationed silently in the corner, turning the everyday arrangement of domestic space into a museum exhibit. It’s funny because it’s only half absurd: plenty of households already choreograph attention, furniture, even silence around the glowing box, while actual people negotiate for eye contact like underfunded performers.

The intent isn’t Luddite scolding so much as a quick, surgical inversion. Coren flips the standard complaint - television makes us dull - into a consumer logic: we’re not corrupted, we’re rationally optimizing for the most interesting thing in the room. That’s the subtextual sting. It implies a market test most of us would fail. Television wins not just by being entertaining, but by being reliably entertaining: edited, paced, lit, and engineered to never ask anything back. People, by contrast, are messy, slow, and demanding; they require reciprocity, patience, and the risk of boredom.

Context matters. Coren wrote from within late-20th-century Britain, when TV became the default hearth and the joke about everyone “watching telly” had already curdled into habit. His line catches that moment before smartphones, when the living room still pretended to be a social space while behaving like a viewing chamber. The wit is breezy; the diagnosis is cold.