"Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke"
About this Quote
Lynda Barry’s genius is taking a romantic abstraction and rendering it as a cheap gag prop that still leaves a burn mark. “Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke” riffs on the old prank: the object designed to signal pleasure, sophistication, a little swagger, suddenly bites back. It’s funny, but the laugh catches because the premise isn’t that love is dangerous; it’s that we know it’s dangerous and reach for it anyway.
The intent isn’t to dunk on romance so much as to puncture its marketing. Cigars are performative. You don’t just consume them; you announce something about yourself while you do. Barry’s choice suggests love as a kind of self-authored identity project, a thing we adopt partly for how it makes us look and feel in the story we’re telling about our lives. The “willingly” does the heavy lifting: the wound isn’t an accident. People consent to risk because the alternative is a smaller, safer life that feels like its own kind of harm.
As a cartoonist, Barry traffics in compressed truth: one image, one twist, maximum emotional residue. The subtext carries her broader preoccupations - adolescence, longing, bad choices made in good faith, the way desire can be both sincere and self-sabotaging. She also democratizes the drama. This isn’t love as epic tragedy; it’s love as everyday slapstick with real consequences, the kind of joke you tell to admit you’re still going to do it again.
The intent isn’t to dunk on romance so much as to puncture its marketing. Cigars are performative. You don’t just consume them; you announce something about yourself while you do. Barry’s choice suggests love as a kind of self-authored identity project, a thing we adopt partly for how it makes us look and feel in the story we’re telling about our lives. The “willingly” does the heavy lifting: the wound isn’t an accident. People consent to risk because the alternative is a smaller, safer life that feels like its own kind of harm.
As a cartoonist, Barry traffics in compressed truth: one image, one twist, maximum emotional residue. The subtext carries her broader preoccupations - adolescence, longing, bad choices made in good faith, the way desire can be both sincere and self-sabotaging. She also democratizes the drama. This isn’t love as epic tragedy; it’s love as everyday slapstick with real consequences, the kind of joke you tell to admit you’re still going to do it again.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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