War & Peace Quote by Barry Humphries

There’s a particular British-Australian sting to this: the joke isn’t just that the army was unpleasant, but that parental pride can feed on your misery like it’s proof of character. Humphries frames service less as patriotic duty than as a family theater where suffering is a kind of credential. The first sentence sets up the expected script (parents pleased, son dutiful), then the second swerves into the darker, funnier truth: they’re pleased not only by conformity, but by discomfort. Pain becomes evidence the institution is working.

That’s classic Humphries - the entertainer who built whole careers out of exposing the absurd mechanics of respectability. The line reads like a miniature version of his larger project: puncturing the self-satisfied moralism of middle-class propriety, especially in postwar cultures where “doing the hard thing” is treated as inherently ennobling. The subtext is a critique of the way older generations outsource their values to institutions: if the army makes you miserable, it must be making you “a man,” and if you’re miserable under it, then the system is validated.

It also lands because the resentment is delivered with surgical lightness. No grand grievance, just a sly observation about love expressed through coercion. Humphries isn’t mourning the army; he’s mocking the emotional economy behind it, where approval is conditional and the child’s interior life barely registers. The laughter comes from recognition: how many families confuse endurance with virtue, and call that care?