Humor & Life Quote by Robert Benchley

Benchley treats the hangover like a terminal illness and, in doing so, exposes how quickly we reach for comforting nonsense when faced with consequences we invited. The line is built on a bait-and-switch: it opens with the sensible-sounding warning against "family remedies" (the folk wisdom of tomato juice, greasy breakfasts, aspirin rituals), then detonates into absolute melodrama. Death, as "the only cure", is obviously untrue, which is precisely why it lands. The joke isn’t about drinking; it’s about the human need to narrate suffering in extremes, to make a private misery feel epic.

The intent is comic exaggeration with a side of social critique. Benchley is poking at the domestic theater around hangovers: the well-meaning spouse, the old aunt’s miracle tonic, the idea that pain can be negotiated away with inherited tricks. By dismissing these cures as amateur medicine, he frames the hangover as an experience too raw for sentimentality or community advice. It’s a temporary exile from polite life, where even affection feels like noise.

Context matters: Benchley wrote in an American culture that could be simultaneously Prohibition-haunted and cocktail-soaked, where drinking carried both glamour and guilt. By elevating the hangover to the level of mortality, he gives readers permission to laugh at their own self-inflicted fragility. The subtext is confession without repentance: yes, I did this to myself, and no, your wholesome solutions can’t save me. Only time can. Death is just time, weaponized into a punchline.