Success Quote by Clive Anderson

The joke lands because it treats crime like a career track with a personal brand problem: if you want the applause, you sacrifice the outcome; if you want the outcome, you stay anonymous. Clive Anderson frames that trade-off with the crisp logic of a business aphorism, then punctures it by applying it to two absurdly specific “professions” - poisoners and Great Train Robbers. The specificity is doing a lot of work. Poisoning is the archetype of quiet, meticulous wrongdoing; train robbing is loud, cinematic, already halfway to folklore. Pairing them lets Anderson swing between the intimate and the spectacular while keeping the same punchline: notoriety is operational incompetence.

The subtext is about modern celebrity as a kind of occupational hazard. “Famous” is presented as a measurable output, like profit, but it’s actually the byproduct of failure: you become legible to the public, therefore legible to the police. That’s why “successful” and “famous” are mutually exclusive in his setup. It’s a comic version of the surveillance-era truth that attention is a trace, and traces get you caught.

Context matters, too: as an entertainer, Anderson’s weapon is the urbane, mock-reasonable voice. He’s not moralizing about crime; he’s ridiculing the audience’s appetite for glamorous villains. The line quietly indicts our storytelling instincts: we only remember the bungled criminals, because the competent ones don’t leave a story behind.