Life & Wisdom Quote by Dave Barry

Leave it to Dave Barry to take a national profile and reduce it to an agrarian apocalypse. The line works because it’s delivered in the deadpan cadence of a fact, the kind you’d find in a geography textbook, only to pivot into absurdity: not merely “lots of sheep,” but a slow, inevitable conquest. That exaggeration is the joke, but it’s also the point. Barry isn’t describing Ireland; he’s describing how travel culture, and outsiders more generally, flatten places into a single postcard detail and then confidently call it knowledge.

The intent is affectionate mockery with a tourist’s grin: Ireland as green, rural, pastoral, quaint. The subtext is that “quaint” is a trap. It’s the word people use when they’ve run out of curiosity but still want to sound charmed. By casting sheep as a consuming force, Barry flips the usual romanticization of the countryside into something faintly menacing, exposing how easy it is to turn a living country into a themed backdrop.

Context matters: Barry’s humor thrives on the self-assured voice of an American everyman who knows just enough to be dangerous. He’s lampooning his own category of observer, the traveler who mistakes a prevailing impression for a comprehensive portrait. The sentence is funny because it’s silly; it sticks because it quietly indicts the lazy shorthand we use for places we don’t bother to fully see.