(On seeing a former lover for the first time in years) I thought I told you to wait in the car.

The line trades on Tallulah Bankhead’s cultivated persona for razor-edged, sexually frank wit. Addressing a former lover as though he were a chauffeur or subordinate (“wait in the car”) collapses intimacy into social hierarchy, turning a potentially awkward reunion into a display of dominance and comic detachment. The humor depends on incongruity: a romantic past is reframed as mere service, implying the speaker has moved on—or is pretending to—by reducing the ex to a functionary. Like many Bankhead quips, it also signals a refusal of sentimentality and a preference for performance: the comeback is less about the lover than about maintaining control of the scene.