Humor & Life Quote by James Thurber

Nonconformity is supposed to be a refusal of the herd. Thurber’s punchline is that it often becomes its own herd, complete with uniform and password. “Like everybody else” detonates the self-flattering myth at the center of counterculture: the belief that opting out is, by itself, a personality.

Thurber’s intent is surgical mockery, aimed less at true iconoclasts than at the people who consume rebellion as a ready-made identity. The question format matters. It doesn’t accuse; it needles. It’s the voice of an exasperated parent, a skeptical friend, or the internal monologue you have when someone insists they “don’t do trends” while wearing the trend’s official costume. The humor comes from the inversion: the “nonconformist” is revealed as a joiner, just in a different line.

The subtext is about social signaling. Nonconformity isn’t framed as an ethical stance or creative risk; it’s framed as group membership with different aesthetics. Thurber is pointing to a very American cycle: mainstream culture produces a norm, a subculture forms to reject it, the subculture hardens into codes, and soon you can conform to the anti-norm with the same anxious diligence as any conventional striver.

Contextually, Thurber wrote in a period when mass media and advertising were standardizing taste, even as bohemian scenes and “independent” postures were becoming legible styles. The joke still lands because the marketplace now sells nonconformity at scale. Rebellion, once a rupture, becomes a subscription.