You can become famous but you can’t become unfamous. You can become infamous but not unfamous.

Chappelle’s line plays on the asymmetry of public reputation: notoriety is easy to acquire and hard to shed. “Famous” and “infamous” are states conferred by an audience, and once a person becomes a widely recognized symbol—whether admired or condemned—the label tends to persist independent of later behavior. The joke’s invented antonym (“unfamous”) underscores how language itself lacks a clean way to describe returning to anonymity, suggesting that modern celebrity culture treats visibility as irreversible. Implicitly, it’s a warning about the permanence of public narratives and the difficulty of reclaiming privacy or a neutral identity after mass attention.