Humor & Life Quote by Margaret Cho

Cho’s line slips a stiletto into a service-uniform pocket: if you want to move through the world unseen, get yourself mistaken for “the help.” The word “incognito” is doing heavy lifting here, elevating low-wage work to the level of espionage while quietly indicting the culture that makes it possible. This isn’t praise for humility; it’s a grim joke about invisibility as social policy. When you’re bussing tables, cleaning rooms, stocking shelves, you’re not just underpaid - you’re often unregistered in the moral imagination of the people above you.

The “effective cloak” lands because it’s both metaphor and social fact. A cloak implies intentional disguise, but lower-class employment doesn’t need theatricality; it comes preloaded with assumptions: harmless, background, interchangeable. That’s why the “dagger” hits so hard. Cho isn’t literally suggesting violence as much as naming the latent threat that elites refuse to see: the ignored can carry secrets, anger, intelligence, leverage. When a society trains itself to look through workers, it also trains itself to be surprised by them.

As a comedian, Cho weaponizes exaggeration to expose how class functions like stage blocking. The powerful command the spotlight; the working class becomes set dressing. Her subtext is that this arrangement isn’t just unjust - it’s stupidly insecure. The punchline isn’t the dagger. The punchline is that the cloak is already there, issued with the job.