Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken flips Darwin on its head with the kind of insolence that doubles as a diagnosis. The joke lands because it pretends to be a simple reversal - ape descended from man, not man from ape - while smuggling in a sharper claim: people resist evolution less out of piety than out of vanity. If you tell someone they share ancestry with animals, you bruise the self-image that modern life works so hard to inflate. Mencken’s punchline suggests the “average” person doesn’t object to being special; they object to being merely continuous with everything else.

The word “average” is doing extra work. Mencken isn’t attacking science-deniers as exotic extremists; he’s targeting the default setting of public opinion, the comfortable mediocrity that insists the universe must flatter it. “Harder...to believe” isn’t about evidence at all. It’s about status. Evolution becomes an insult, a downgrade in the social hierarchy of creation, and the mind scrambles for any story - biblical or otherwise - that preserves human exceptionalism.

Context matters: Mencken wrote in an America still vibrating from the Scopes “Monkey Trial” era, when evolution was less a technical theory than a cultural grenade. His jab isn’t neutral reportage; it’s a deliberate provocation aimed at Protestant moral certainty, small-town respectability, and the democratic faith that “common sense” should outrank expertise. The line works because it turns the listener into the butt of the joke while offering them a way out: laugh, and you’ve already admitted you’re not the “average ape.”