Daily Inspiration Quote by Harvey Korman

Performance, in Harvey Korman's telling, isn’t a clean act of will so much as a strange chemical reaction: cloth, glue, and a borrowed face create a person who didn’t exist five minutes earlier. The line is funny because it treats transformation as both accidental and total. He’s not claiming method-actor mastery; he’s admitting he stumbled into the character once the “suit” and moustache did their work. That humility sets up the punch: “I’m truly extraordinary.” It lands as a deliberate overreach, the kind of brag that only works because he’s already framed himself as the bewildered recipient of a miracle.

The subtext is a backstage demystification of comedy. Great comic performances often look effortless, which invites audiences to assume control and confidence. Korman flips it: the body leads, the mind follows. “All the drag on” hints at the tradition of costume-driven gender play in sketch comedy, where exaggeration becomes permission - permission to be bigger, meaner, freer, funnier. The moustache is a tiny prop with outsized authority: a visual cue that tells the actor, and the audience, what rules apply now.

Context matters, too. Korman came up in an era when television comedy rewarded quick metamorphosis: a repertory performer disappearing into types, accents, silhouettes. His marveling tone isn’t faux-naive; it’s a veteran’s respect for the weird machinery of show business, where identity is something you can zip up, glue on, and suddenly inhabit - then take off and be ordinary again.