Insanity doesn't run in my family. It gallops.

This quip is a compact example of self-deprecating humor built on exaggeration. By shifting from the familiar phrase “runs in my family” to the more vivid “it gallops,” the speaker turns a potentially stigmatizing topic—mental instability—into a comic image of something not merely present but uncontrollably fast and forceful. The joke also plays on the way families talk about inherited traits, satirizing the idea of “family tendencies” by treating them like a hereditary racehorse. In quotation culture it functions as a one-line icebreaker: it signals wit, acknowledges personal or familial chaos without confession, and converts anxiety into a punchline.

1) "Insanity runs in my family. It gallops."
2) "Madness doesn't run in my family—it gallops."