Education Quote by Joel Siegel

Siegel’s line lands because it performs the oldest trick in the critic’s book: it pretends to hand you a moral lesson, then reveals the lesson is actually a consumer warning. The setup borrows the film’s own premise of sexual abstinence, a premise that’s already loaded with pseudo-spiritual self-improvement. Then he flips the “virtue” of restraint into something aggressively practical: don’t abstain from sex, abstain from paying for this movie. It’s a clean, almost schoolyard-grade pivot, but that’s the point. The joke is engineered for maximum shareability before “shareability” was a formal media metric.

The subtext is more surgical than the punchline suggests. By invoking “40 Days and 40 Nights” as a teacher, Siegel implies the film is so didactic and so thin that it can only function as an accidental sermon. He’s also mocking the way Hollywood packages moral-ish concepts as rom-com novelty: sacrifice as gimmick, chastity as plot device, self-denial as a two-hour commercial for itself.

Context matters: early-2000s studio romantic comedies were built to be broadly inoffensive, mildly naughty, and relentlessly marketable. Critics often felt reduced to being traffic cops for disposable entertainment. Siegel’s barb reclaims power in a single sentence, turning the box office - the one metric studios can’t ignore - into the site of protest. The “especially” is the knife twist: abstinence isn’t just good; it’s righteous when it starves this particular machine.