Here’s to the ladies who lunch—
Everybody laugh—
Lounging in their caftans and planning a brunch
On their own behalf.

These lines come from “The Ladies Who Lunch,” a show-stopping number sung by Joanne in Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s concept musical Company (premiered on Broadway in 1970). In the song, Joanne—an acerbic, wealthy, middle-aged woman—offers a series of increasingly biting toasts that satirize the rituals and self-delusions of her social set. The “ladies who lunch” are affluent women with leisure time, fashion, and social calendars, and the lyric’s tone mixes wit with contempt and a hint of self-recognition, as Joanne ultimately implicates herself in the same empty routines she mocks.

The lyric skewers a particular kind of privileged idleness: people insulated by money and status who fill their days with performative socializing (“lounging,” “planning a brunch”) while congratulating themselves “on their own behalf.” The imperative “Everybody laugh—” signals that the scene is both a joke and a social command: the group’s cynicism becomes a shared performance that masks boredom, dissatisfaction, and moral drift. In Company, the number functions as a critique of shallow sophistication and as a darker self-portrait of Joanne, whose scorn reads as both social satire and a defense against her own loneliness and complicity.