Fatherhood Quote by Peter De Vries

De Vries lands the joke with a kind of deadpan inevitability: the father doesn’t merely dislike radio; he’s impatient for the next invention so he can extend his disgust into the future. It’s a punchline structured like progress itself, where each “advance” arrives pre-damned. The humor isn’t in the gadgets, it’s in the personality type-the man whose real hobby is disapproval, who needs modernity the way a fire needs oxygen.

The line skewers a particular mid-century domestic posture: the patriarch as self-appointed customs agent of culture, policing what enters the home. Radio and television aren’t neutral technologies here; they’re symbols of mass culture, of voices arriving uninvited, of leisure that bypasses the gatekeeper’s taste. The father’s hatred reads less like principled critique than like a bid for control, a refusal to be impressed, an allergy to being left behind by time.

De Vries, a novelist with a satirist’s ear for family cruelty dressed up as wit, also tucks in a child’s perspective: the speaker knows this man well enough to predict his future resentment. That predictive certainty is the sting. It suggests the father’s antagonism is not about content (programming, morality, “quality”) but temperament-an identity built around suspicion of the new.

The joke endures because it names a recurring cultural reflex: every generation produces someone who experiences innovation as a personal insult, and who treats adaptation as capitulation. De Vries doesn’t argue with that reflex; he simply exposes how small it can sound when spoken aloud.