Wealth & Money Quote by Jim Bishop

Parental protectiveness rarely gets a cleaner, meaner metaphor than this: a teenage date becomes a gorilla, and the daughter a million-dollar Stradivarius. Jim Bishop isn’t just being funny; he’s staging a moral panic in miniature, compressing an entire mid-century American fatherhood script into one image. The joke lands because it’s extravagantly unfair. A gorilla can’t appreciate a Stradivarius, can’t even understand what it is. That’s the point. The date isn’t framed as merely inexperienced or horny, but as categorically incapable of care, refinement, or restraint.

The subtext is ownership dressed up as love. A Stradivarius is priceless, rare, and above all handled by experts. Calling a daughter that doesn’t simply praise her; it turns her into a fragile asset that can be damaged, “played,” or devalued. Bishop’s father figure isn’t anxious about who she is becoming, but about what might happen to what he believes he’s been stewarding. It’s protection and control braided together so tightly they’re hard to separate.

As a journalist writing in an era when dating was often treated as a supervised gateway to marriage, Bishop taps into a mainstream cultural suspicion of young male sexuality and a deep confidence in paternal judgment. The line works because it lets the audience laugh at an ugly instinct while also validating it. You get the release valve of comedy and the comfort of righteousness: of course he’s worried; look who’s holding the case.