I remember your thread about him posting the photo of you asleep on your birthday, and honestly I think these two incidents together are quite revealing.
When you told him that photo embarrassed and hurt you, he didn’t respond by caring that he’d hurt you. He told you that you take things too seriously, wished you had a “sense of humour” and compared you unfavourably with this same SIL because apparently she can take a joke.
Now she’s being held up again as the superior model of womanhood because she “can take a joke”, “doesn’t nag”, “doesn’t whine”, is sweet, etc.
I’d really look at the misogyny underneath those words. “Nagging wife” and “whining woman” are incredibly convenient stereotypes because they make the woman’s response the problem and disappear whatever the man is actually being asked to take responsibility for. What does he call nagging? Are you repeatedly asking him to do things he’s agreed to do, contribute properly at home, parent, remember things or take responsibility without being managed? Because if so, you wouldn’t need to keep asking if he bloody did them.
And “have a sense of humour” seems to mean “accept behaviour you find humiliating and don’t hold me accountable for it”. A joke is supposed to be funny to the person it’s aimed at. Once you’ve said “that hurt me”, a loving partner doesn’t get to overrule you by announcing that a more easy-going woman would have laughed.
I also think the SIL comparison is particularly dishonest when you’ve said she has paid domestic help. Of course two households with completely different distributions of domestic labour may have different levels of conflict about domestic labour. Holding up the woman with a housekeeper/cook and nanny as proof that wives don’t need to “nag” while ignoring the labour being done by other women is almost a parody of how women’s work gets made invisible.
What you said about him being the less attractive/less successful brother was deliberately nasty and intended to hurt him. I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. But I also wouldn’t allow the entire conversation to be rewritten around your retaliation. He spent the conversation repeatedly telling you how you fail as a woman and wife compared with another woman. You finally retaliated by applying his own comparison game to him, and suddenly he discovered that being compared unfavourably with someone else is cruel and humiliating. Apparently comparison is acceptable when he’s the judge and you’re the deficient one.
I’d be asking myself some much bigger questions about this marriage. How much of being a “good wife” to him actually means being a woman who causes him no discomfort? How often are your complaints renamed “nagging”, your distress renamed “whining”, your boundaries treated as humourlessness and your anger used to obscure the behaviour that made you angry? Does he expect you to absorb disrespect pleasantly, perform domestic and emotional labour without complaint and remain “sweet” while doing it?
Because taken with your birthday thread, I don’t think the problem here is that you need a better sense of humour. I think your husband has a deeply misogynistic idea of the ideal wife: a woman who is agreeable when he’s agreeable, agreeable when he’s inconsiderate, and agreeable when she’s hurt. And when you stop being agreeable, instead of examining his own behaviour, he reaches for sexist language that makes your refusal to tolerate it the character flaw.
Your comeback wasn’t healthy communication. But I’d be very wary of accepting a version of events where that becomes the great moral outrage while his obvious contempt for you, comparisons and entitlement to a compliant wife are overshadowed.