Why are sex and violence always linked? I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds - sexandviolence - until we can't tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex."

Dick Cavett, best known as a television talk-show host and humorist, often used observational comedy to critique media habits and cultural clichés. This quip targets the late-20th-century tendency in news and entertainment to pair “sex and violence” as a stock phrase—especially in discussions of film, television, and popular culture. Cavett’s joke imagines the phrase becoming so automatic that the concepts blur, culminating in a deliberately absurd reversal (“police were forced to resort to sex”). The line fits Cavett’s broader style: urbane, language-focused humor that exposes how repeated formulations can dull meaning and distort perception.

The joke works by treating a familiar cultural pairing (“sex and violence”) as if it were a single fused idea (“sexandviolence”), then pushing that fusion to a logical absurdity. Cavett is satirizing how media shorthand can normalize or aestheticize violence by packaging it with titillation, and how constant repetition can make audiences less attentive to the moral and emotional differences between the two. The punchline’s inversion—authorities “resorting to sex” to control a mob—highlights the emptiness of the cliché and suggests that language shapes thought: when we compress complex realities into catchphrases, we risk confusing categories that should remain distinct.