Alphonsus Paulus Johannes Maria:
(Fons) Jansen
(Bussum, 12 October 1925 – Hilversum, 23 March 1991).
Dutch cabaret artist and writer.
Traveling by plane: to save time you spend hours being bored.
What a deception really: making people laugh at the truth.
If everyone is going to say what they think, what will be left of the truth?
When you’re on stage as a man, you’re either gay or playboy. The only freedom you are left with is this: you can choose for yourself.
An eco-friendly defoliant has been found: autumn.
The sentence is a humorous paradox:
> “An eco-friendly defoliant has been found: autumn.”
A ‘defoliant’ is normally a chemical used to make plants lose their leaves—often associated with environmental damage, particularly products such as Agent Orange. Autumn achieves the same visible result naturally: deciduous trees shed their leaves without chemicals.
The joke comes from describing a season as if it were a newly invented commercial product. It also satirizes claims that industrial or chemical products are “eco-friendly.”
Origin and author:
The line is attributed to Fons Jansen (1925–1991),
a Dutch cabaret performer, writer, and humorist known for concise wordplay and ironic observations.
The probable Dutch original is:
> “Er is een milieuvriendelijk ontbladeringsmiddel gevonden: de herfst.”
Some versions use “uitgevonden” (“invented”) instead of “gevonden” (“found”).
It circulated as one of Jansen’s aphorisms or cabaret one-liners in the later twentieth century. An exact first performance or publication is not consistently identified in standard quotation collections, so it is safest to describe it as ‘widely attributed to Fons Jansen’ rather than attach it to a specific work without further documentation.
