Life & Mortality Quote by Arthur Baer

Alimony is a financial obligation, but Arthur Baer frames it as something worse: a transaction with no living payoff. The joke lands because it hijacks the everyday logic of upkeep. Oats are sensible, even virtuous, when the horse is alive. Once it is dead, the same purchase becomes grotesquely pointless. That whiplash is the engine of the line: it turns duty into farce in a single image.

The specific intent is clear-eyed provocation. Baer isn’t trying to describe divorce law; he’s trying to sour the listener’s feelings about post-marital support by making it feel like waste. The metaphor smuggles in a worldview where the marriage is over in the same final way death is over, and any continuing payment is not responsibility but denial. It’s a neat rhetorical trick: equate an ex-spouse with a dead animal, then let the audience do the rest of the emotional work.

The subtext is less about money than resentment. Alimony becomes the punchline for a broader complaint: that men (in the period’s default assumption) are compelled to keep “feeding” something that no longer serves them. That’s why the line has had such long afterlife in barroom wisdom and old-school comedy. It flatters the payer’s sense of being trapped, while erasing the recipient’s labor, dependency, or sacrifices during the marriage.

Context matters: Baer wrote in an era when divorce was becoming more visible and the culture industry was churning out gags that treated marital conflict as public entertainment. The cruelty is part of the craft; the wit is also the alibi.