"Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely"
About this Quote
Coupland’s line lands like a throwaway joke, then keeps cutting. “Royalty” isn’t just a family with crowns; it’s a brand whose product is bloodline, continuity, and the soothing fiction that some people are born to symbolize the nation. Cloning takes that premise to its logical, grotesquely efficient endpoint: if legitimacy is hereditary, why not manufacture heredity?
The wit sits in the false binary. “Do very well” suggests a palace board meeting where tradition is managed like logistics: reduce succession risk, standardize heirs, smooth out scandals with replaceable bodies. It’s funny because it treats monarchy as a system of customer expectations rather than mystique. The threat is equally sharp: if royalty refuses the techno-fix, it “disappear[s] completely” - not because revolution finally arrives, but because relevance does. Coupland’s real target is modernity’s impatience with slow, irrational institutions. In a culture that updates everything, a family selling permanence starts to look like a software version that can’t patch.
The subtext is about identity under late capitalism: when value comes from recognition, the “original” matters less than the logo. Cloning becomes a metaphor for how celebrity, politics, and even personal selves get replicated into predictable templates. Royalty survives only if it admits it already runs on duplication - staged rituals, rehearsed gestures, curated sameness. The joke isn’t that cloning would change monarchy; it’s that it would finally make explicit what monarchy has always been: continuity as performance, with the bodies swapped as needed.
The wit sits in the false binary. “Do very well” suggests a palace board meeting where tradition is managed like logistics: reduce succession risk, standardize heirs, smooth out scandals with replaceable bodies. It’s funny because it treats monarchy as a system of customer expectations rather than mystique. The threat is equally sharp: if royalty refuses the techno-fix, it “disappear[s] completely” - not because revolution finally arrives, but because relevance does. Coupland’s real target is modernity’s impatience with slow, irrational institutions. In a culture that updates everything, a family selling permanence starts to look like a software version that can’t patch.
The subtext is about identity under late capitalism: when value comes from recognition, the “original” matters less than the logo. Cloning becomes a metaphor for how celebrity, politics, and even personal selves get replicated into predictable templates. Royalty survives only if it admits it already runs on duplication - staged rituals, rehearsed gestures, curated sameness. The joke isn’t that cloning would change monarchy; it’s that it would finally make explicit what monarchy has always been: continuity as performance, with the bodies swapped as needed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|
More Quotes by Doug
Add to List
