Humor & Life Quote by Ray Combs

It lands like a throwaway one-liner, but it’s built on a comedian’s instinct for social danger: the moment an argument stops being about facts and turns into a fight over identity. The punchline hinges on a nasty little trap hidden inside a common insult. “Who do you think you are?” is usually rhetorical shorthand for “Know your place.” Combs flips it into something literal, warning that with a schizophrenic person you might not like the answer - because the premise of the insult is that identity is stable, singular, and available for shaming.

The intent isn’t really clinical; it’s comic risk management. Combs is pointing at the brittleness of our debate habits, how quickly we reach for language that escalates rather than clarifies. He makes the listener complicit: you can hear the speaker’s smugness in that quoted line, then watch it boomerang.

The subtext is more uncomfortable. The joke trades on popular, often inaccurate ideas about schizophrenia (the lazy “multiple personalities” conflation), using mental illness as a rhetorical landmine. That’s part of why it “works”: it’s transgressive and vivid, compressing anxiety about unpredictability into a neat warning label. In the era Combs worked in - broad, punchy, mass-audience stand-up and game-show humor - the culture rewarded these shortcut references. Today it reads as both a clever critique of ego-driven arguing and a reminder of how casually comedy has used mental illness as a prop for surprise.