Wealth & Money Quote by Elayne Boosler

A line like this works because it weaponizes a taboo with the timing of a rimshot and the moral clarity of a protest sign. Elayne Boosler isn’t making light of AIDS so much as yanking the spotlight off the disease and onto the people who exploited the panic around it. The wish is obviously impossible, which is the point: by fantasizing a world where infection tracks not sex, blood, or bad luck but gullibility and hypocrisy, she flips the script on who gets blamed.

The target is the televangelist economy of the 1980s and early 1990s: slick pastors selling salvation like a product, raking in donations, and often preaching punitive, judgmental ideas about AIDS as divine retribution. Boosler’s joke reroutes that cruelty back toward the pulpit. It’s an ethical boomerang disguised as a one-liner. If you’re going to treat illness as punishment, she implies, let it punish the grift.

The subtext is anger, not shock for shock’s sake. It’s also a defense mechanism: gallows humor as a way to puncture sanctimony and reclaim agency in a period when AIDS was wrapped in stigma and political neglect. By choosing “giving money” as the transmission method, Boosler pinpoints a specific American vulnerability - the urge to outsource conscience to charismatic figures on TV. The laugh lands because it’s a cathartic reversal: the people selling fear become the ones who should fear consequences.