Success Quote by Red Buttons

"There is only one goal" lands like the opening of a commencement speech, then Red Buttons yanks the podium away and replaces it with a bathroom mirror. That bait-and-switch is the whole mechanism: he borrows the cadence of American seriousness - the self-help absolutism, the grindset credo, the tidy promise that life can be reduced to a single rule - and undercuts it with something aggressively mundane. Not "keep dreaming" or "keep fighting", but "keep working and keep flossing". The joke is that both are treated as equally nonnegotiable, equally adult, equally unsentimental.

Buttons came up in an era when comics learned to survive on rhythm, economy, and a kind of genial authority. His intent here isn't to deliver dental advice; it's to puncture our hunger for grand purpose. By pairing labor with hygiene, he implies that most of life is maintenance, not climax - a repetition of small disciplines that don't photograph well. That's quietly subversive in a culture that worships breakthroughs and reinventions. Flossing is the perfect punchline because it's universally recognized as virtuous, mildly annoying, and easiest to skip when no one's watching. So is showing up to work.

The subtext is also a defense of the working performer: longevity over legend. A comic's career, like oral health, isn't secured by one big night; it's secured by the boring stuff you do after the applause. Buttons makes it sound simple because simplicity is the bit - and because the older you get, the more "one goal" starts to look a lot like staying in decent repair.