A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.

Fred Allen (1894–1956) was a leading American radio comedian and satirist, best known for his long-running NBC program and for a persona that skewered public life, bureaucracy, and show business pretension. This quip reflects Allen’s recurring comic theme: the inefficiency of committees and the self-importance of “important people” convened to appear decisive while avoiding responsibility. It fits the mid-20th-century American culture of expanding corporate and governmental administration, where meetings and conferences could become rituals of status and delay rather than action. The line circulated widely in quotation collections as a representative example of Allen’s dry, skeptical wit about institutional decision-making.

The joke turns on a paradox: individually, the attendees “can do nothing,” yet collectively they achieve an even more elaborate form of inaction—formally deciding that nothing can be done. Allen satirizes how group processes can convert personal impotence into institutionalized paralysis, with the added irony that the participants are labeled “important.” The quote critiques conferences as performances of authority: they produce resolutions, minutes, and consensus, but often function to distribute blame, protect reputations, and postpone risk. Its sting comes from suggesting that bureaucracy can transform the absence of solutions into a decision that sounds prudent, thereby making failure look like governance.