Wit & Attitude Quote by Dave Barry

Barry’s line lands because it borrows the sober cadence of science journalism and uses it to smuggle in a joke about how easily “objective” language can be recruited to justify crude social observations. “Scientists now believe” is the classic authority shield; it parodies the way pop science headlines turn messy human behavior into a neat biological purpose. The punch is the absurd overreach: reducing breasts to a single “primary biological function,” and not even a reproductive one. The joke isn’t just horny; it’s epistemic. Barry is mocking our hunger for evolutionary alibis.

The subtext is an affectionate, slightly exasperated portrait of heterosexual male attention as a short-circuiting system. “Make males stupid” isn’t a claim about women so much as a confession about men: rationality is fragile, performative, and easily punctured by desire. That’s why the line works in Dave Barry’s wheelhouse of late-20th-century American humor, where the safest target is the speaker’s own demographic and the punchline is male incompetence.

Context matters, too. Barry wrote in an era when mainstream comedy routinely treated gender difference as a natural fact, then built sitcom plots and newspaper columns on the inevitability of men’s cluelessness and women’s mysterious power. The line flatters and critiques at once: it lets male readers laugh at themselves while also nudging them toward a less heroic self-image. Its cynicism is gentle, but it still exposes a cultural habit: when we can’t defend our behavior, we call it biology.