A hangover is the wrath of grapes.

Dorothy Parker, famed for her epigrams and her association with New York’s Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, often turned social vices into razor-edged comedy. This quip belongs to her broader persona as a satirist of modern urban life—cocktail culture, romantic disappointment, and the self-inflicted miseries of sophistication. The line plays on the era’s familiarity with alcohol as both social lubricant and private undoing, and it fits Parker’s characteristic method: compressing a whole narrative (the pleasures of drinking and the punishment after) into a single, memorable twist of language.

The joke hinges on a pun: “wrath of grapes” echoes the biblical-sounding “wrath of God,” while “grapes” metonymically stand for wine and, by extension, drinking. Parker reframes a hangover as moral retribution delivered not by a deity but by the very substance that produced the prior night’s pleasure. The line’s bite comes from its mock-grandiosity—elevating a mundane misery into apocalyptic diction—while also capturing a truth about indulgence: consequences are built into the indulgence itself. It’s a compact example of Parker’s talent for turning self-knowledge into wit.