Motherhood Quote by Victor Borge

A perfect Victor Borge line: elegant, ridiculous, and just cruel enough to make you laugh before you realize what you’re laughing at. “My father invented a cure for which there was no disease” sets up the classic comic target: human ingenuity untethered from human need. It skewers the proud inventor mindset, the impulse to solve problems for the applause of solving them, even if the problem has to be imagined into existence. Then Borge snaps the trap shut: “unfortunately my mother caught it and died of it.” The “cure” becomes the disease. Progress turns predatory.

The intent is misdirection with moral teeth. Borge isn’t doing stand-up tragedy; he’s exploiting the audience’s comfort with a familiar, almost wholesome premise (dad the clever tinkerer) and pivoting into a shock punchline that forces a retroactive re-read. “Caught it” is the masterstroke: you can’t literally catch a cure, but the phrasing borrows the grammar of illness to expose the logic of harm. It’s a joke that works by violating category boundaries - medicine becomes contagion, prevention becomes cause.

The subtext hits a 20th-century nerve. Borge lived through an era when “invention” was both salvation and menace: new drugs, new technologies, new efficiencies, plus the mechanized catastrophe of war. He fled Nazi-occupied Denmark; the idea that well-intentioned systems can kill isn’t abstract. Delivered in Borge’s genial style, the line lets the audience process anxiety through laughter: a compact warning about solutions in search of problems, and the collateral damage they quietly normalize.