Motherhood Quote by Robert Orben

A clean joke with a dirty little indictment: Orben takes a Bible-ready commandment and swaps in plastic, letting the punchline do what sermons often can’t. “Honor thy father and mother” carries inherited authority, obligation, even guilt. “All major credit cards” is the new pantheon - branded, transactional, and suspiciously eager to be “respected” right up to your credit limit. The laugh lands because the syntax mimics the original moral instruction; the substitution makes consumer culture look like a counterfeit religion that somehow still collects tithes.

Orben’s intent isn’t nostalgia for some sepia-toned past where family was flawless. It’s to spotlight how devotion has been rerouted. In the old model, allegiance was messy but human: parents demanded time, patience, and care. The credit-card model asks for less intimacy and more compliance: pay on time, carry a balance, accept the fees. “Honored” becomes the key verb - a word we reserve for people, principles, and graves, now applied to financial instruments. That category mistake is the satire.

The context matters: Orben is a showbiz craftsman from the postwar boom, watching American identity shift from church-and-family signaling to lifestyle-and-consumption signaling. The line works as dinner-table comedy and as cultural critique because it doesn’t moralize; it merely reveals what we already practice. The real sting is recognition: plenty of us do behave as if Visa is a relative and MasterCard is owed a birthday call.