Humor & Life Quote by Spike Milligan

Milligan takes a tired tourist joke and detonates it from the inside. The setup leans on a familiar bit of prurient curiosity: the kilt as sanctioned spectacle, Scottishness reduced to a prop that invites permission to ask what you would never ask a man in trousers. The expected punchline is a coy confirmation or scandalized refusal. Instead, Milligan swerves into mock-engineering: "No, it's all in perfect working order."

That pivot does two things at once. It refuses to satisfy the voyeur (no details, no titillation), while still delivering the bawdy release valve the audience came for. "Perfect working order" is the delicious misdirection - an industrial, bureaucratic phrase dragged into the bedroom. It reframes the body as machinery: intact, functional, none of your business. The laughter comes from the collision between the question's intimate intent and the answer's brisk, oddly formal defensiveness.

There's also a sly assertion of agency. The interrogator wants access; Milligan answers on his own terms, turning the gaze back with a kind of comic boundary-setting. It's dirty without being explicit, aggressive without being cruel. In the postwar British comedic tradition Milligan helped reshape - where absurdity, wordplay, and anti-authoritarianism mingle - the line reads like a small rebellion against etiquette and against the audience's entitlement. He doesn't just joke about what's under the kilt; he jokes about the cultural impulse to ask.