Humor & Life Quote by Richard Harris Barham

Barham’s line lands like a polite cough in a haunted parlor: it’s a ghost story joke dressed up as social instruction, or maybe social instruction exposed as a ghost story. The wryness comes from the pairing. Ghosts are supposed to be uncanny, disruptive, uncontrollable. “Ladies,” in the Victorian code Barham is ribbing, are supposed to be the opposite: decorous, contained, waiting for permission to enter the conversation. By yoking them together, he turns “feminine propriety” into something eerie and imposed, as if silence were a supernatural rule rather than a social one.

The intent is not simply to be cute; it’s to puncture the self-serious etiquette of his moment. “Never speak till spoke to” echoes the disciplining language aimed at children, servants, and women, the whole hierarchy of who gets to initiate and who must respond. Barham’s comedian’s move is to exaggerate the rule until it becomes absurd: imagine a ghost, a being famous for unsolicited appearances, dutifully waiting to be addressed like a guest at tea.

Subtext: the haunting isn’t in the afterlife, it’s in the room. Social norms operate like specters - invisible, authorless, powerful. The line also flatters the speaker’s authority: if ladies (and ghosts) require prompting, the person who “speaks to” them controls the encounter. Barham laughs at that control even as he reveals it, which is why the quip still reads sharply: it’s a joke about silence that won’t stay quiet.