Life's Pleasures Quote by Dave Attell

Attell’s joke works because it weaponizes the polite, public-service language around “drunk driving” and then detonates it with a brutally selfish excuse. The opening feint - “some people are against drunk driving” - pretends there’s a reasonable debate to be had. Then he names “those people” as “the cops,” shrinking a moral, communal taboo into a mere obstacle: not ethics, just enforcement. It’s a classic comic tell about how bad behavior often rationalizes itself. We don’t fear harm; we fear consequences.

The subtext is darker: the real villain isn’t alcohol, it’s entitlement. “Sometimes, you’ve just got no choice” mimics the language of necessity used for rent, childcare, survival. Attell grafts it onto the least sympathetic scenario imaginable, then makes it worse by invoking children and school - a sacred American errand. The punchline lands because it’s an inversion of responsible-parent rhetoric: the excuse sounds like duty, but it’s a confession of negligence.

Contextually, this is late-90s/2000s club comedy cynicism: jokes that dare you to laugh at something you’ve been trained to treat with solemnity. Attell isn’t asking you to endorse drunk driving; he’s baiting you into noticing how easily “family values” and “busy life” can be used as camouflage for reckless choices. The laughter comes from the absurdity, and the sting comes from recognizing the logic in miniature all around us: if you can frame it as obligation, you can almost make anything sound forgivable.