Humor & Life Quote by Dennis Miller

Leave it to Dennis Miller to smuggle a foreign-policy sneer into a foodie punchline. The joke hinges on a then-fresh American frustration: early-2000s France, with President Chirac as its avatar, resisting the Iraq War while Washington tried to assemble a coalition. Miller’s line compresses that whole diplomatic standoff into a single, biting caricature: the French won’t move for strategy or solidarity, only for cuisine.

The specific intent is to mock French reluctance as aesthetic self-interest. “Going in” is militarized slang, brusque and locker-room simple; “truffles” is the opposite, an elite delicacy that signals luxury, taste, and a certain stereotype of French priorities. By yoking Iraq to truffles, Miller makes the war sound like an absurd scavenger hunt, implying that the only “resource” France would fight for is something you shave over pasta. It’s a jab at French sophistication as cowardice in disguise.

The subtext is more revealing: it’s not really about truffles, or even France, but about American impatience with dissent. The line flatters a hawkish audience by turning geopolitical disagreement into a punchable national personality flaw. That’s why it works comedically: it converts policy complexity into a clean moral hierarchy, with the speaker’s side cast as pragmatic and serious, and the other side as precious and venal.

Context matters, too. In the “freedom fries” era, jokes like this functioned as cultural ammunition, a way to keep the room laughing while closing ranks.