Humor & Life Quote by Spike Milligan

Milligan’s “sure cure” lands because it’s aggressively literal in a situation defined by queasy uncertainty. Seasickness is the body betraying you on a moving world; his answer is to remove the sea entirely. It’s not a remedy, it’s an escape hatch - a comedian’s way of pointing out that a lot of “advice” is just a dressed-up refusal to deal with the problem as stated.

The line works on two tracks. First, it’s a tidy piece of misdirection: you expect ginger, horizon-gazing, some folk-wisdom hack. Instead you get a tree - solid, stationary, terrestrial. The punch is the audacity of certainty (“sure cure”) paired with an impossibility if you’re actually at sea. Milligan is parodying the confidence of prescriptions that sound practical but ignore lived conditions: the kind of counsel that makes sense only in the speaker’s fantasy.

Second, it’s a small manifesto for Milligan’s broader comedic mode - surreal, deflationary, allergic to pomposity. As a Goon Show-era mind, he loved puncturing systems with absurd literalism, taking language at face value until it collapses. “Sit under a tree” also smuggles in a sly anti-heroic comfort: the real cure is not grit-your-teeth endurance but opting out, reclaiming stillness.

Contextually, it reads like postwar British humor sharpening itself against a culture of stiff-upper-lip competence. When official life insists everything is manageable, Milligan answers: yes, if you change the entire setting. That’s not just a joke; it’s a critique of how authority sells simplicity by pretending circumstances don’t exist.