Wit & Attitude Quote by Richard Morris

There’s a clerical severity to the joke, the kind that smiles without quite smiling. Morris skewers the half-measure: not singing, exactly, but the performative twitch of it. “Bursting” implies loss of control, an impulsive eruption that demands an audience. “For seven seconds” is the masterstroke - comically precise, petty in its accounting, like a man timing frivolity with a pocket watch. The punchline isn’t that singing is stupid; it’s that a tiny, self-contained blast of song is socially incoherent. It interrupts the room, summons attention, then refuses to pay off. You’ve asked people to recalibrate to a new mode and then abandoned them mid-adjustment.

The subtext is a critique of display without commitment, emotion without consequence. It’s also, quietly, a warning about taste: don’t indulge your private enthusiasms in public unless you’re prepared to carry them somewhere. A clergyman in the 19th century would have lived inside tightly managed rituals of voice and silence - hymns, responses, sermons - where sound means something because it’s structured, communal, and sustained. Against that backdrop, the seven-second serenade reads like modern attention economy behavior before its time: a micro-performance designed to register, not to endure.

Morris’s intent feels double-edged: he’s policing decorum, yes, but he’s also puncturing a certain sentimental spontaneity. The line works because it treats a small social misfire as a moral category, then exaggerates it just enough to make the scolding funny. The laughter is the discipline.