A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.

Milton Berle (1908–2002), a major American vaudeville and television comedian (“Mr. Television”), was known for one-liners that satirized modern institutions and workplace habits. This quip targets the mid‑20th‑century corporate and civic culture in which committees proliferated as a default way to make decisions, often producing paperwork and procedure rather than action. Berle’s joke plays on the familiar experience of meetings that generate official records (“minutes”) while consuming disproportionate time (“hours”), reflecting a broader comedic tradition of lampooning bureaucracy and organizational inefficiency rather than a single identifiable event or speech.

The line hinges on a pun: committees “keep minutes” in the sense of recording meeting minutes, yet they “lose hours” by wasting time. Berle’s point is not that collaboration is inherently bad, but that group decision-making can become self-perpetuating—prioritizing process, documentation, and consensus over decisive action. The joke captures a common critique of bureaucracy: responsibility diffuses across many people, discussion replaces execution, and the organization confuses activity with progress. As a comic aphorism, it endures because it compresses a widely shared workplace frustration into a memorable, rhythmic contrast.