I am Charley’s aunt from Brazil, where the nuts come from.

The line is associated with Brandon Thomas’s farce *Charley’s Aunt* (first performed in London in 1892). In the play, two Oxford undergraduates need a respectable chaperone so they can entertain young women; when the expected guardian fails to appear, they persuade their friend Lord Fancourt Babberley (“Babbs”) to impersonate Charley’s wealthy aunt, Donna Lucia d’Alvadorez, supposedly “from Brazil.” The humor depends on the absurdity of the disguise and on Victorian/Edwardian English stereotypes about exotic wealth and foreign origins—hence the jokey explanatory tag about Brazil nuts.

The humor comes from incongruity and social satire. The speaker adopts the authority of a rich foreign relative—someone whose status should command instant respect—yet immediately undercuts that grandeur with a trivial factoid (“where the nuts come from”). The line exposes how easily social circles can be managed through labels (wealth, foreignness, family connection) rather than genuine knowledge. It also signals the farce’s central theme: identity as performance. The audience is in on the joke, watching characters accept a caricature of “Brazil” because it fits their expectations and serves their desires, making the eventual complications of the impersonation both inevitable and amusing.