Skip to main content

Humor & Life Quote by Benny Hill

"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.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
Source
Later attribution: Dim Wit (Rosemarie Jarski, 2008) modern compilationISBN: 9781407024684 · ID: CXi9jHuMjRwC
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... Girls are like pianos . When they're not upright , they're grand . Benny Hill -Er , you don't happen to know how much polar bears weigh , do you ? -Polar bears ? No. -Neither do I , but it breaks the ice . Would you like to dance ...
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Hill, Benny. (2026, February 16). Girls are like pianos. When they're not upright, they're grand. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/girls-are-like-pianos-when-theyre-not-upright-30081/

Chicago Style
Hill, Benny. "Girls are like pianos. When they're not upright, they're grand." FixQuotes. February 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/girls-are-like-pianos-when-theyre-not-upright-30081/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Girls are like pianos. When they're not upright, they're grand." FixQuotes, 16 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/girls-are-like-pianos-when-theyre-not-upright-30081/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Benny Add to List
Girls are like pianos - Benny Hill's witty wordplay analyzed
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

England Flag

Benny Hill (January 21, 1924 - April 20, 1992) was a Comedian from England.

7 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

Harold Budd, Composer
Johann G. Seume, Theologian