Wit & Attitude Quote by J. B. Morton

A joke this grotesque only works because it’s weaponized against the very instinct to “improve” things. Morton takes the old proverb about making a silk purse from a sow’s ear and twists it into domestic farce: not just your ear, but your wife’s, not just futility, but the casual violence of a “blundering fool” who thinks he’s doing something clever. The laugh lands late, after the mind registers the absurd image and then the insult: the hog isn’t merely low-status; it’s trapped in a world where the ambitious and incompetent constantly reach for it.

The specific intent is to puncture genteel optimism and self-help earnestness, the kind that treats everything as raw material for uplift. By choosing “hog” over “sow,” Morton sharpens the self-deprecation into something class-coded: the speaker belongs to the unfashionable, the unrefined, the people who get “made over” by reformers, advertisers, critics, and busybodies. The “silk purse” is a status symbol, and the grotesque cost of manufacturing it is quietly the point.

Subtextually, it’s also a dig at social climbing and at the patronizing idea that refinement can be imposed from above without damage. The “blundering” matters: the attempt isn’t just doomed, it’s clumsy, uncomprehending, and indifferent to what it wrecks. In Morton’s mid-century British comic tradition, that cynicism is the engine: society’s improvers aren’t heroes, they’re hazards, and the people they target have every reason to fear the next well-meaning idiot with a plan.