Marriage Quote by Jean Kerr

Kerr’s joke lands because it’s impolite in exactly the right way: it treats “friendly divorce” as a kind of professional oxymoron, the way a “good mortician” confronted with a living patient would be. The comedy hinges on a neat misdirection. We expect the lawyer to be the calm technician helping two adults separate with dignity. Instead, Kerr implies that the lawyer’s comfort is tied, at least partly, to conflict staying conflict. If everyone is reasonable, if nobody needs to be “saved,” the lawyer loses not just billable hours but narrative purpose.

The mortician comparison is deliberately grotesque, and that’s the point. Divorce, even when mutual, is culturally staged as a death: of a household, a shared future, a public story. By pairing the attorney with a mortician, Kerr yanks the sentimental veil off the process and replaces it with a trade logic: some professions thrive on the fact that certain endings stay ended. The “patient sits up” image also punctures the fantasy of clean closure. A marriage can be declared dead on paper while still moving around in memory, custody arrangements, mutual friends, and old resentments that suddenly reanimate.

As a mid-century American humorist and playwright, Kerr wrote in an era that treated divorce as both scandal and social comedy. Her line skates that tension: it’s funny because it’s too cynical to be polite, and too accurate to dismiss. The subtext is less “lawyers are villains” than “institutions develop an appetite for the problems they’re built to manage.”