Humor & Life Quote by Spike Milligan

Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion is Milligan doing what he did best: taking a taboo, loading it into a too-straight sentence, then pushing it past the point of propriety until it flips into absurdist critique. The line lands because it mimics the stiff, officious voice of public instruction, the kind you might hear from a government leaflet or a school assembly, then cranks it into totalizing overkill. Every conceivable occasion is the joke. It’s not advice; it’s a parody of advice culture.

The specific intent feels less like sexual moralizing than a jab at prudish societies that can’t talk about sex without either whispering or legislating it. By making contraception omnipresent, Milligan exposes the underlying anxiety: the fear that desire is a problem to be managed, preempted, sanitized. The hyperbole also needles the era’s shifting norms. Milligan’s career spans postwar Britain through the sexual revolution, when the pill, changing divorce laws, and loosening censorship collided with lingering Victorian reflexes. In that friction, a comedian’s bluntness becomes a tool: say the unsayable, but say it in a way that reveals the absurdity of the rules around it.

Subtext: if we’re going to pretend everything can be controlled by policy and propriety, let’s apply that logic everywhere until it becomes ridiculous. It’s a one-liner that doubles as a cultural diagnosis: the comedy isn’t sex; it’s the anxious bureaucracy that forms around it.