Time & Perspective Quote by William Gaddis

Gaddis isn’t offering comfort so much as a diagnosis: modern life has made comedians of us all, whether we want the job or not. The line works because it flips comedy from a genre into a survival posture. “We’re comic” lands like an insult and a confession at once, collapsing the distance between performer and audience. Nobody gets to sit above the mess and merely “observe”; everyone is implicated in the gag.

The repetition is doing the heavy lifting. “We’re comic. We’re all comics.” reads like a drumbeat of resignation, a voice trying to convince itself. Then the pivot: “We live in a comic time.” That’s not about punchlines; it’s about a social order that’s structurally absurd. Gaddis wrote from inside the late-20th-century churn of corporate speech, bureaucratic ritual, media noise, and the steady privatization of meaning. In that environment, earnest language gets priced out of the market. What’s left is parody, mimicry, the defensive smirk.

“And the worse it gets the more comic we are” is the darkest move. It suggests comedy isn’t the antidote to crisis; it’s the symptom of crisis escalating. As conditions deteriorate, the only available stance is to heighten the performance: more irony, more bit, more self-aware deflection. Gaddis’s subtext is bleakly contemporary: when systems become too big to argue with, humor becomes a kind of consent you can plausibly deny. You laugh so you don’t scream, but also so you don’t have to act.