Daily Inspiration Quote by Isaac Barrow

A 17th-century mathematician scolding you for dirty jokes is funny on its face, but Barrow isn’t trying to be funny. He’s trying to shut humor down. “I pass by” is the giveaway: a rhetorical shrug that actually tightens the grip. He pretends to skip ahead, as if the case is already settled, then drops the verdict anyway: “very culpable.” Not merely tasteless, not merely sinful, but blameworthy in a way that demands accounting.

Barrow’s phrasing also performs the moral hierarchy of his time. “Facetious” is lightness, social ease, the kind of wit that circulates in taverns and colleges and makes everyone complicit through laughter. Pair it with “obscene and smutty matters” and you get his real anxiety: humor doesn’t just describe vice, it normalizes it. Smut, for Barrow, is less a category of content than a contagion mechanism. Jokes travel; jokes recruit; jokes make private impulses feel like public permission.

The subtext is disciplinary. As a clergyman as well as a mathematician (and a major Cambridge figure), Barrow is guarding a culture where authority depends on controlling speech as much as behavior. He treats ribald wit as a moral technology used against the church and the university: if you can laugh at the rules, you can live as if they’re optional.

It’s also an early recognition of something modern: comedy isn’t neutral. The laugh can be a release valve, but it can also be a solvent, dissolving shame, restraint, and eventually the legitimacy of the people asking for either.