Education Quote by Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries lands the insult with the elegance of a cocktail napkin epigram: business isn’t condemned as immoral or even stupid, just terminally uninteresting. Calling it the "logical destiny of bores" turns career choice into character diagnosis. The joke works because it pretends to be a neutral observation about life paths while smuggling in a savage social taxonomy. Humphries isn’t only mocking commerce; he’s skewering the kind of person who treats conformity as ambition and safety as personality.

The phrase "most of my contemporaries" does double duty. It’s a sideways flex (I was the exception) and a snapshot of a mid-century school pipeline where respectable boys were trained for respectable jobs, and "respectable" was often code for unthreatening. In that world, business isn’t a calling; it’s a default setting. Humphries frames it as "logical", a sly dig at how institutions rationalize the narrowing of human possibility: you get sorted, you comply, you disappear into the beige.

Coming from an entertainer - and a satirist whose characters (think Dame Edna) thrive on exposing middle-class pretension - the line reads like a manifesto for misfits. It’s also a confession of class anxiety in reverse: instead of yearning for the safe ladder, he ridicules it to protect the risk he took. The sting is that he’s not just laughing at them; he’s implying they never had enough inner life to want anything else.