Love Quote by Daniel Pinkwater

Pinkwater’s line is a perfect little grenade of self-deprecation that detonates under the tidy moralism of “health talk.” He grants the premise immediately: yes, fatness correlates with elevated risks. That opening concession matters because it disarms the listener who came to lecture. Then he pivots with “But guess what?” - a vaudeville flourish that signals we’ve entered performance, not confession. The punchline, “almost infinitessimal,” lands as both a comic overreach and a rhetorical trap: you can hear the exaggerated confidence, the mischievous misspelling, the refusal to speak in the sanitized language of wellness statistics.

The intent isn’t to deny medical reality so much as to mock the way “risk” gets used as a social cudgel. In public discourse, risk is rarely a neutral probability; it becomes a story about deservingness, discipline, and who is allowed to be comfortable in their body. Pinkwater’s joke calls out that bait-and-switch. People cite population-level data to justify intimate contempt, then act surprised when the target refuses to play the role of penitent.

Context matters: Pinkwater, a humorist with a lifelong taste for the absurd, writes from inside the cultural machinery that treats fat bodies as public property. The line plays like stand-up, but it’s also a defense strategy: comedy as boundary-setting. By making the risk “almost infinitessimal,” he’s not offering a spreadsheet; he’s reclaiming the right to be a person first and a health project never.