Life & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s line lands like a martini thrown in someone’s face: crisp, mean, and exquisitely timed. The joke hinges on an inversion so cold it becomes diagnostic. Sex, the culture insists, is the great engine of pleasure and intimacy; Waugh shrugs and ranks it below dentistry, a service famous for discomfort, submission, and the faint smell of antiseptic. The punchline isn’t just prudishness. It’s contempt for the modern melodrama that treats sleeping together as either scandal or salvation.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a withering dismissal of sexual hype, a refusal to grant erotic life the spiritual importance the 20th century increasingly assigned it. Underneath, it’s also a social weapon: Waugh’s persona turns distaste into superiority, implying that other people’s erotic urgency is a form of vulgar credulity. If you’re fussed, you’re already unserious.

Context matters because Waugh wrote from inside a world he both belonged to and despised: English Catholic conservatism, aristocratic manners, and a modernity he viewed as noisy, sentimental, and cheaply liberating. His fiction is full of bodies and appetites treated as farce or hazard rather than liberation. The dentist comparison adds another layer: sex becomes a transaction, an appointment, a procedure - intimating not just boredom but a suspicion that what’s sold as “pleasure” is often obligation wearing perfume.

What makes it work is the speed of its cynicism. Waugh doesn’t argue. He administers.