Life & Wisdom Quote by Doug Coupland

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.