Women: You can't live with them, and you can't get them to dress

The words of Emo Philips, though clothed in the garments of absurdity, conceal a deeper wisdom about the mystery of women and the strangeness of human longing: “Women: You can’t live with them, and you can’t get them to dress up in a skimpy little Nazi costume and beat you with a warm squash or something.” At first glance, it is laughter, a jest meant to bewilder. Yet in its exaggeration lies a timeless truth—the eternal tension between desire and reality, between the expectations men place upon women and the unpredictable nature of love itself.

From the ancients we hear echoes of this struggle. The poets of Greece sang of Aphrodite, goddess of love, whose blessings brought both joy and torment. Men dreamed of her favors, yet trembled at her power, for no one could master the heart of woman. Philips, through humor, points to the same paradox: man cannot live without woman, yet he cannot bend her wholly to his whimsical desires. To seek to do so is to fall into folly, as his comic image reveals.

Consider the tale of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Antony, mighty general of Rome, could command armies and conquer kingdoms, yet in the presence of Cleopatra, he was undone. She would not bend to his command, but instead drew him deeper into her will, into her pageantry, into her games of power and seduction. Was this not the same truth Philips makes mock of—that woman is not the servant of man’s fantasies, but a force of her own, who shapes the story as much as he?

The mention of the costume and the squash is not meant as literal desire but as a symbol of the absurd extremes to which human longing may travel. In humor’s mirror, we see our own strangeness: how often men and women seek from each other things that cannot, and perhaps should not, be given. The laughter arises not only from the ridiculousness of the request, but from the recognition that we, too, are creatures of contradictions, asking love to fulfill both noble and foolish dreams.

Let the generations remember: humor is not the enemy of wisdom, but its companion. In Philips’s wild and comic vision, we are reminded that the bond between men and women is filled with paradoxes, frustrations, and delights. It cannot be reduced to control, nor to fantasy, but must be embraced in all its mystery. For though we laugh at the absurdity, the laughter itself teaches us—love is never simple, never tamed, and therein lies its eternal power.