I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell?

The remark captures Warhol’s characteristic uncertainty about sincerity versus performance—an uncertainty he often cultivated as both an artistic method and a public persona. Read this way, “everything was just being funny” suggests a world interpreted through irony, camp, and surface effects; the later doubt signals a destabilizing realization that the line between joke and reality is porous. The closing question—“how can you tell?”—turns the problem outward, implying that modern life (and mass media in particular) makes authenticity hard to verify. The quote resonates with Warhol’s art, which repeatedly tests whether images are critique, celebration, or simply repetition.