Life & Wisdom Quote by Dave Barry

Barry turns the so-called Age of Discovery into a punchline about branding. By pegging the moment to a comically specific date, he mimics the voice of textbook authority, then punctures it: Europeans "came up with a new concept: the West". The joke isn’t just that sailors accidentally bumped into the Americas. It’s that an entire directional hemisphere gets framed as an idea someone invented in a committee meeting. Exploration becomes marketing. Geography becomes a PR strategy.

The intent is to deflate triumphalist history. Traditional narratives cast European expansion as bold curiosity and heroic navigation. Barry recasts it as restlessness plus desperation: they were "looking for a new place to try to get to" because the old routes, maps, and myths weren’t delivering the riches promised. That phrasing is doing work: it suggests repeated failure, a kind of trial-and-error capitalism at sea, where continents are unintended consequences of supply-chain problems.

Subtextually, "the West" is less a compass point than a story Europeans tell about themselves: modern, central, destined. By calling it a "concept", Barry spotlights how cultural power packages itself as natural fact. The West is presented not as one region among many but as an identity that retroactively organizes the world into center and periphery.

Context matters: Barry wrote in an era comfortable with skewering national myths, when humor could act as a solvent for sanctimony. The line lands because it’s breezy while smuggling a serious critique: empire didn’t just conquer land; it invented categories that still shape who gets to feel like the default.