Red meat is not bad for you. Now blue-green meat, that's bad for you!

Tommy Smothers (of the Smothers Brothers comedy duo) was known for deadpan, contrarian one-liners that punctured earnest public debates with literal-minded common sense. This joke riffs on recurring American health anxieties about diet—especially periodic warnings about red meat—by shifting the frame from nutritional controversy to the obvious, sensory reality of spoiled food. The humor depends on the audience’s familiarity with “red meat is bad for you” as a cultural refrain and on Smothers’s persona of calmly stating something self-evident as if it were a serious correction.

The line satirizes how dietary advice can become moralized or overcomplicated. By conceding that “red meat is not bad” and then drawing the absurd boundary at “blue-green meat,” Smothers reduces the debate to a basic principle: what’s truly dangerous is not a food category demonized in headlines, but food that has clearly gone bad. The joke also pokes fun at the way people seek definitive rules (“good” vs. “bad” foods) rather than exercising practical judgment. Its punch comes from the sudden, vivid image of moldy meat and the understated delivery that treats it as a reasonable distinction.