Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Hood

Friendship is supposed to be the last sturdy thing in a collapsing life; Hood twists that assumption into a gag you can feel in your gums. "The best of friends fall out" opens like a proverb, the kind that offers worldly comfort about quarrels and reconciliation. Then the line swerves: the "friends" are teeth, and they "had done some years ago". The joke lands because it exploits our reflex to read sentiment before anatomy, and because the punchline is delayed just long enough to let the moralizing tone bloom and then curdle.

Hood was a poet with a satirist's scalpel, writing in a Britain where bad dentistry was less a personal failing than a class marker and a public health reality. Tooth loss was common; to joke about it was to admit it without self-pity. The subtext is bodily decline made social: even your "best" companions abandon you, and they do it quietly, in stages, years before you're ready to name it as loss. That "some years ago" is doing heavy work, implying a long, undramatic erosion rather than a single tragic event.

The line also needles the sentimental language Victorians loved. Hood borrows the diction of moral counsel and uses it to smuggle in the embarrassments of the body, the stuff polite society preferred to keep offstage. It's funny, yes, but it's also a small act of realism: the comic mask that lets mortality speak.