Marriage Quote by Will Cuppy

Cuppy’s genius here is how he shrinks the epic into the petty without losing the sting. Julius Caesar and Cleopatra are cultural shorthand for grand romance, geopolitical seduction, the kind of affair that gets painted in oils. Cuppy punctures it with a flat, domestic fact: “he had a wife at home.” The line turns history’s high drama into the eternal problem of divided loyalties and inconvenient reality. You can almost hear the shrug.

The kicker is the last sentence: “There’s always something.” It’s a masterpiece of comic deflation, the voice of someone who’s watched big plans die on small obstacles. Not “fate,” not “empire,” not “the gods” - just “something.” The vagueness is the joke and the worldview: human messes aren’t usually brought down by one grand moral reckoning, but by a steady drip of complications, obligations, paperwork, spouses, logistics. Cuppy treats it like a cosmic law of clutter.

Context matters: writing in early 20th-century America, Cuppy specialized in dry, sideways humor that mocked pretension and heroic narratives. Between world wars and amid a rising skepticism about “great men,” his tone fits an era learning that the private life isn’t a footnote to history; it’s the grit in the gears. The subtext isn’t just about adultery. It’s about the limits of power: even Caesar can’t fully rewrite the conditions of his own life. There’s always something.