Daily Inspiration Quote by A. P. Herbert

Fun is treated here like contraband: not merely frivolous, but legally suspicious. A. P. Herbert’s line works because it mimics the deadpan voice of bureaucratic certainty, then pushes it one step past plausibility until it exposes the whole posture as absurd. The joke isn’t just that Parliament forgot to legislate fun; it’s that a certain kind of official mind assumes life only becomes legitimate once it’s been itemized, regulated, and stamped.

Herbert, who moved easily between politics, law, and satire, is skewering a distinctly British faith in procedure as morality. “We are not here for fun” sounds like the unspoken motto of institutions that confuse seriousness with virtue and productivity with purpose. The final clause - “no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament” - is a perfect comic escalation: it turns a personal scold into an indictment of a system that treats the absence of a rule as a reason to prohibit. It’s the logic of petty authoritarianism in miniature: if it isn’t authorized, it’s suspect.

The subtext is sharper than a gag about joyless officials. Herbert is warning how easily public life becomes self-justifying: bureaucracy doesn’t need to announce itself as anti-pleasure; it simply builds a world where pleasure is always an exception, always needing permission, always slightly embarrassing. In that light, “fun” becomes a proxy for everything human that resists official measurement - spontaneity, play, idleness, even dissent. The line lands because it recognizes a real cultural impulse, then lets it convict itself in its own pompous diction.