Humor & Life Quote by Robin Williams

Robin Williams lands this joke like a throwaway, but it’s doing a lot of cultural work in a single breath: it hijacks the sci-fi anxiety of cloning and reroutes it into America’s oldest regional punchline. The setup borrows the moral panic of the late-’90s and early-2000s cloning debates (Dolly the sheep, headlines about “playing God”), then punctures that grandiosity by swapping lab coats for family reunions. The snap is the misdirection: you expect ethical bioengineering; you get incest-coded stereotype.

The specific intent is classic Williams: pop a swollen public conversation with an absurd comparison that’s instantly legible. He’s not offering a policy argument about genetics; he’s chasing the laugh that comes from collapsing “high” and “low” cultural registers - the futuristic and the folksy, the scientific and the taboo.

Subtext-wise, the line trades on a Northern/coastal sense of superiority about the South: rural, insular, backward, too close-knit in the wrong way. “Cousins” functions as shorthand for that whole insult. It’s efficient, which is why it works onstage, but it also reveals how comedy can launder prejudice as folklore. The joke’s engine is distance: if “the South” is safely othered, the audience can enjoy the transgression without feeling implicated.

Context matters because Williams came up in an era when regional stereotypes were mainstream comedic currency and rarely interrogated. Today the same line still gets laughs, but it also reads like a time capsule of what audiences were trained to find “obviously” funny - and who was expected to take it.