Daily Inspiration Quote by Joe Orton

Good taste is Orton's favorite blunt instrument: he swings it back at the people who use it to police everyone else. The line is a trapdoor under a certain kind of bourgeois certainty, the sort that treats "taste" as both moral credential and social border control. Orton isn't defending vulgarity for its own sake; he's exposing how appeals to "good taste" usually mask timidity, snobbery, and a fear of being contaminated by the wrong desires, bodies, or jokes.

The intent is pointedly accusatory. "Always go on about" is doing heavy lifting, sketching a nagging, self-appointed referee. Orton frames taste not as a sensibility but as a performance: a nervous insistence on rules. When someone keeps invoking taste, it's often because taste is all they have - a substitute for actual judgment, curiosity, or courage. In that sense, "very bad taste" becomes less an aesthetic verdict than a character diagnosis.

Context matters. Writing in mid-century Britain, Orton was taking the stage just as older censorship norms and class proprieties were starting to wobble, and he made a career out of kicking them. His comedies turn respectable rooms into crime scenes of hypocrisy, with laughter as the weapon. The subtext here is gleefully contemptuous: the guardians of refinement are usually protecting their own smallness. Orton's line works because it flips the hierarchy in a single sentence - not by arguing, but by puncturing. It's not a defense of taste so much as a refusal to let taste be used as a gag.