"Adultery - which is the only grounds for divorce in New York - is not grounds for divorce in California. As a matter of fact, adultery in Southern California is grounds for marriage"
About this Quote
Sherman takes a bureaucratic technicality and flips it into a cultural roast, the kind that lands because it sounds like a travel tip you hate to admit might be true. The premise is absurdly procedural: adultery is either a legal key (New York) or legally irrelevant (California). Then he delivers the punchline that Southern California doesn’t just tolerate infidelity; it rewards it with the ultimate upgrade, matrimony. The joke isn’t really about divorce law. It’s about regional mythologies, and how Americans use them to launder moral judgment into “local color.”
Written in the mid-century moment when New York still read as old-world, rule-bound, and Catholic-adjacent in its public ethics, California played the national screen as sunlit, unbuttoned, and newly invented. Sherman’s line treats those reputations as fact, and the comedy comes from the speed with which he turns legislation into libido. “Grounds” does double duty: legal basis becomes social foundation, as if the whole institution of marriage in L.A. is built on scandal.
The subtext is a dig at modernity’s selective morality: we keep marriage as a prestige object while quietly renegotiating its terms to match desire, status, and convenience. Southern California, in this framing, is where reinvention is so normal that even betrayal can be rebranded as destiny. Sherman’s intent isn’t to prosecute adultery; it’s to puncture the idea that law equals virtue, and to underline how quickly a place can turn “sin” into lifestyle.
Written in the mid-century moment when New York still read as old-world, rule-bound, and Catholic-adjacent in its public ethics, California played the national screen as sunlit, unbuttoned, and newly invented. Sherman’s line treats those reputations as fact, and the comedy comes from the speed with which he turns legislation into libido. “Grounds” does double duty: legal basis becomes social foundation, as if the whole institution of marriage in L.A. is built on scandal.
The subtext is a dig at modernity’s selective morality: we keep marriage as a prestige object while quietly renegotiating its terms to match desire, status, and convenience. Southern California, in this framing, is where reinvention is so normal that even betrayal can be rebranded as destiny. Sherman’s intent isn’t to prosecute adultery; it’s to puncture the idea that law equals virtue, and to underline how quickly a place can turn “sin” into lifestyle.
Quote Details
| Topic | Divorce |
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