"Girls are like pianos. When they're not upright, they're grand"
About this Quote
A tidy little dirty joke disguised as a simile, this line is Benny Hill in miniature: brisk, cheeky, and engineered to land before you can object. The wordplay does the heavy lifting. “Upright” and “grand” are piano categories, but Hill uses them as a hinge between polite description and sexual posture. The sentence starts in the language of furniture-store innocence and ends in a wink; the laugh comes from realizing you’ve been led into the punchline by a respectable noun.
The intent isn’t subtle: it’s to turn women into props in a bawdy vaudeville mechanism where the “cleverness” of the pun acts as a social permission slip. The subtext is a familiar mid-century bargain: if the joke is technically smart, the misogyny can pass as harmless mischief. “Girls” (not “women”) matters, too, shrinking the subject into a generalized, infantilized category designed for male appraisal. She’s compared to an object built to be played; the line flatters the speaker’s entitlement even as it invites the audience to join the complicity.
Context helps explain why it worked. Hill’s comedy thrived in a British TV era that treated sexual innuendo as both rebellious and safe, a way to tease censorship while reinforcing old hierarchies. Today the punchline still “works” mechanically, but the mechanism is the point: it’s a reminder of how easily wit can be used as camouflage for a worldview that only recognizes women when they’re positioned for someone else’s pleasure.
The intent isn’t subtle: it’s to turn women into props in a bawdy vaudeville mechanism where the “cleverness” of the pun acts as a social permission slip. The subtext is a familiar mid-century bargain: if the joke is technically smart, the misogyny can pass as harmless mischief. “Girls” (not “women”) matters, too, shrinking the subject into a generalized, infantilized category designed for male appraisal. She’s compared to an object built to be played; the line flatters the speaker’s entitlement even as it invites the audience to join the complicity.
Context helps explain why it worked. Hill’s comedy thrived in a British TV era that treated sexual innuendo as both rebellious and safe, a way to tease censorship while reinforcing old hierarchies. Today the punchline still “works” mechanically, but the mechanism is the point: it’s a reminder of how easily wit can be used as camouflage for a worldview that only recognizes women when they’re positioned for someone else’s pleasure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Quote attributed to Benny Hill , listed on the Wikiquote page for Benny Hill. |
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