Humor & Life Quote by James Thurber

Thurber’s line works like a polite compliment that’s secretly a grenade. On the surface, it flatters women: “wiser,” endowed with an almost mystical “understand[ing].” Then he booby-traps the praise with a backhanded premise: they “know less.” That tension is the joke’s engine. Wisdom, in Thurber’s world, isn’t an IQ contest; it’s a survival skill in a social system where men hoard “knowledge” as status and women are expected to navigate consequences, moods, and hypocrisy.

The subtext is less about biology than about roles. “Know” points to credentialed, public, often male-coded authority: facts, rules, the official story. “Understand” is private intelligence: reading a room, deciphering motives, recognizing what people will do rather than what they claim they’ll do. Thurber flips the prestige hierarchy. The thing society ranks lower (intuition, relational acuity) becomes the higher form of intelligence, while the thing it celebrates (male certainty, data, declarations) looks shallow.

Context matters: Thurber wrote in an era when women were frequently locked out of institutional “knowing” but central to managing the emotional and domestic realities men could afford to ignore. The gag lands because it’s observably true in a lopsided way: if you’re denied access to the levers of power, you get good at reading the people pulling them.

It’s also cynically self-protective. A male comedian praising women for “understanding more” can admire them without surrendering the male claim to “knowledge.” The line laughs at masculinity’s pretensions while keeping the old divisions intact, which is exactly why it still stings.