Humor & Life Quote by James Thurber

Thurber’s joke works because it’s a perfectly dressed surrender. By stretching “boyhood” from toddlerhood to the grave, he turns the confident social category of “men” back into something smaller, rowdier, and fundamentally ungovernable. The line has the clean snap of a proverb, but it’s really an anti-proverb: instead of offering wisdom, it mocks the very idea that anyone can deliver a tidy theory of male behavior.

The intent is comic exaggeration with a sting. “Sure understanding” is the tell. Thurber isn’t claiming boys are mysterious in some romantic, Mars-and-Venus way; he’s mocking the arrogance of people (often parents, teachers, spouses, pundits) who insist they’ve finally decoded them. The punchline is that the decoding industry is the real target. His phrasing makes the “range” sound like an artillery term or a scientific measurement, as if masculinity could be charted with instruments. It can’t, and Thurber delights in that failure.

The subtext is affectionate but not indulgent: male immaturity isn’t an exception, it’s the system. In one sentence he collapses the distance between the tantrum and the midlife crisis, the sandbox power struggle and the boardroom one. Contextually, this fits Thurber’s broader project: using urbane, deadpan absurdity to puncture American confidence in expertise and self-control, especially in domestic life where men often perform competence while quietly improvising. It’s funny because it’s brutal, and brutal because it’s recognizable.