Daily Inspiration Quote by Barry Humphries

Leave it to Barry Humphries to dress up a grenade as a bon mot. The line glides in on the soft music of “beauty” and “happily married,” then swerves into the secretary punchline, exposing how easily respectable language can be used to launder grubby arrangements. It’s classic Humphries: a joke that flatters your sense of sophistication while daring you to notice the rot underneath.

The specific intent is less to titillate than to puncture. By placing “happily married” alongside infidelity, he mocks the self-serving narratives that let powerful men imagine themselves as decent even while behaving badly. The secretary isn’t framed as a person with agency; she’s a role, a workplace archetype - which is the point. The humor lands because it echoes a long-running office mythology in which male authority comes with fringe benefits, and female proximity is treated as availability.

Subtextually, it’s a critique of hypocrisy packaged as complicity. The sentence structure performs the con: you’re led to expect a conservative affirmation of marital sex, then the taboo add-on reveals the speaker’s real values. It also reads as a send-up of a certain mid-century masculine entitlement - the era of expense accounts, closed doors, and “everyone knows” arrangements that were supposedly harmless.

Context matters: Humphries built a career mining social pretension through characters like Dame Edna, making audiences laugh at the very attitudes they half-recognize. The line doesn’t ask you to approve; it asks you to catch yourself laughing, then wonder what, exactly, you just laughed at.