Humor & Life Quote by Richard Murdoch

Power, in Murdoch's telling, is less a ladder than a set of props: some people are instruments you pick up, others are ensembles you have to play with. "Wield" is the brutal verb here. It reduces a person to something grippable, usable, briefly useful. Then Murdoch flips the frame with "join", a word that concedes you can't muscle everything into compliance; sometimes the only way forward is to submit to a collective rhythm and accept you're not the lead.

As a comedian, Murdoch is doing what good comic writing often does: smuggling a social diagnostic into a clean, almost throwaway structure. The line is binary, yes, but it's not simplistic. It's a warning about how quickly relationships can become tactical. The subtext is that we all like to imagine we're "joining" - collaborating, belonging, being decent - while quietly "wielding" whenever the situation allows. Comedy thrives on that hypocrisy: the gap between our self-image and our behavior.

The phrasing also sketches a bleak little sociology of institutions. In workplaces, politics, even families, there are people treated like levers (the assistant, the scapegoat, the eager subordinate) and groups you can't dominate without paying a price (the union, the clique, the public). Murdoch's intent isn't to moralize so much as to puncture the fantasy of pure individual agency. You don't just have power; you negotiate it, impersonate it, and occasionally discover you're the one being held.