The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

Rooney’s quip uses a deliberately blunt comparison to praise dogs for traits people often admire—loyalty, straightforward affection, and an absence of pretense—while gently indicting human social behavior as self-interested or hypocritical. The humor depends on treating “person” as a moral category rather than a biological one: dogs, though not human, can seem more consistently kind in everyday interactions than humans are with one another. As with much of Rooney’s commentary, the line works as a compact piece of social criticism, inviting readers to measure “niceness” by actions and temperament rather than status or intellect.