Marriage Quote by Joey Adams

Joey Adams lands the punch by pretending to praise thrift while actually mocking male evasiveness. The line sets up psychiatry as a luxury service - “expensive questions” suggests both high hourly rates and a kind of clinical probing that feels transactional, optional, even indulgent. Then he snaps to domestic reality: your wife asks the same invasive questions “for nothing,” which is funny because it reframes marital intimacy as unpaid emotional labor and relentless surveillance.

The intent isn’t to diagnose anyone; it’s to flatter an audience that would rather laugh than talk. Adams is working an older, mid-century nightclub sensibility where the wife is cast as the household truth-teller and the husband as the slippery defendant. The subtext is guilt: if you need a psychiatrist, you’ve already been hiding something, and your spouse has been noticing it for years. Paying a professional becomes an almost comic attempt to control the terms of confession - to buy privacy, structure, maybe even neutrality. The wife, by contrast, is presented as unavoidable, emotionally invested, and therefore more frightening.

Culturally, it also captures a moment when therapy was becoming more mainstream but still carried a whiff of status and stigma. The joke reassures skeptics: you don’t need a couch, you already have a marriage. From today’s vantage, the barb cuts two ways: it underestimates mental health care, but it accidentally acknowledges how much informal “therapy” gets outsourced to partners - with no meter running, and no off switch.