Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Curtis

Curtis’s line lands like a grim wink: in the aftermath of 9/11, “business as usual” becomes both a coping slogan and a public-relations posture, and he punctures it in the same breath. The first clause sounds like institutional steadiness - the kind of calm competence agencies are expected to project when the world tilts. Then he undercuts it with “though business before 9/11 wasn’t that hot either,” turning solemn resilience into a self-own. The joke isn’t just gallows humor; it’s a critique of managerial language that pretends continuity is a virtue when it can also be denial.

The specific intent feels twofold. On the surface, he’s trying to lighten a room that likely can’t bear earnestness for long. Underneath, he’s exposing how quickly catastrophe gets routed through the familiar circuits of office life: memos, postures, “positions.” By admitting the agency wasn’t thriving even in normal times, he yanks the audience away from the myth that there ever was a stable “usual” worth defending.

Context matters: the early post-9/11 period was saturated with performative stoicism from institutions, plus an uneasy question about when humor was permissible again. Curtis (as a writer, and a Brit, where understatement is practically a reflex) uses irony as permission to speak honestly: we will keep going, yes, but let’s not romanticize what we’re returning to. The laugh, if it comes, carries discomfort - a reminder that crisis doesn’t create organizational problems so much as reveal how threadbare they already were.