Life & Mortality Quote by Stephen Leacock

Leacock’s joke works because it’s built on a perfectly civilized kind of denial: not the melodramatic “I’m immortal,” but the petty insistence that death is an abstract rumor, a rude sales tactic, an imposition on one’s schedule. The life-insurance agent isn’t selling a policy so much as forcing a conversation we’d rather keep at arm’s length. Leacock frames that intrusion as an argument, as if mortality were a debatable proposition and the agent’s crime were bad logic, not bad timing.

The punchline hinges on a sly grammatical trick. “Some day” is the wedge: death is inevitable, but its date is always conveniently undefined, forever postponable. By replying “which is not so,” Leacock doesn’t refute death; he rejects the agent’s attempt to pin it to a calendar and turn it into a purchasable fear. It’s a defense of psychological sovereignty: you can’t make my finitude your commission.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Writing in the early 20th century, amid the rise of modern finance and the professionalization of risk, Leacock (an economist who understood incentives) skewers how capitalism monetizes uncertainty. Insurance translates existential dread into monthly premiums and actuarial tables, a rational system that still feels like a social faux pas. The detestation isn’t really about the agent; it’s about being forced to acknowledge that the future can be priced, predicted, and used against you. Leacock’s humor is the last refuge of the irrational human, refusing to cooperate with the spreadsheet.