"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible"
About this Quote
A droll verdict on modern life, the line presents the morning as a shared calamity and turns the psychological label of being well-adjusted inside out. The pileup of adjectives — average, healthy, well-adjusted — implies a person who meets every cultural benchmark, yet the punch line is that such a paragon still wakes up feeling awful. The humor springs from that juxtaposition: medical and social ideals collide with the bodily truth of grogginess, and the collision is universal enough to be funny rather than bleak.
Jean Kerr made a career out of puncturing midcentury expectations with wit, especially the glossy ideals of suburban competence and cheerfulness. Writing about family life, deadlines, and domestic chaos, she gave voice to the gap between what people were told adulthood should feel like and what it actually feels like. Seven-thirty evokes alarm clocks, school buses, commuter trains, and the tyranny of schedules. By naming that hour and declaring misery the norm, she offers a sly amnesty from the myth of the chirpy morning person and the postwar creed that virtue begins with early rising.
The choice of the term well-adjusted is not accidental. In the era of popular psychology and advice literature, it was a buzzword for social and emotional equilibrium. Kerr tweaks that jargon by tying it to the most mundane dissonance: you can be perfectly adjusted and still hate getting out of bed. The joke softens a critique of conformity. If even the model adult feels terrible, then the feeling is not a failure but part of the template.
Beneath the quip lies a generous philosophy. Humor turns private discomfort into communal recognition; the laugh affirms solidarity. Coffee and routine will carry the day, and so will the knowledge that the morning slump is not a defect to be corrected but a human condition to be met with wry acceptance.
Jean Kerr made a career out of puncturing midcentury expectations with wit, especially the glossy ideals of suburban competence and cheerfulness. Writing about family life, deadlines, and domestic chaos, she gave voice to the gap between what people were told adulthood should feel like and what it actually feels like. Seven-thirty evokes alarm clocks, school buses, commuter trains, and the tyranny of schedules. By naming that hour and declaring misery the norm, she offers a sly amnesty from the myth of the chirpy morning person and the postwar creed that virtue begins with early rising.
The choice of the term well-adjusted is not accidental. In the era of popular psychology and advice literature, it was a buzzword for social and emotional equilibrium. Kerr tweaks that jargon by tying it to the most mundane dissonance: you can be perfectly adjusted and still hate getting out of bed. The joke softens a critique of conformity. If even the model adult feels terrible, then the feeling is not a failure but part of the template.
Beneath the quip lies a generous philosophy. Humor turns private discomfort into communal recognition; the laugh affirms solidarity. Coffee and routine will carry the day, and so will the knowledge that the morning slump is not a defect to be corrected but a human condition to be met with wry acceptance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Good Morning |
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