Marriage Quote by Robin Williams

Williams comes in sideways, dressed as a linguist, then swings the bat like a bar-room economist. The gag works because it pretends to be educational - “from the Latin” signals authority, dinner-party correctness - and then detonates into grotesque bodily imagery. He’s spoofing the way people try to sanitize divorce with polite language (“irreconcilable differences”) while everyone in the room knows the real storyline is money, humiliation, and power.

The specific intent is less to litigate divorce than to puncture its PR. By translating it into a cartoonish act of castration “through his wallet,” he collapses emotional loss and financial loss into one obscene mechanism. It’s an old anxiety sharpened into a single, vivid pipeline: the fear that a man’s identity, sexuality, and status can be repossessed by paperwork. The line is funny because it’s too violent to be taken literally, yet close enough to cultural folklore - “she took him for everything” - that the audience can recognize the paranoia.

Subtextually, it’s also Williams doing what he often did: using speed and exaggeration to smuggle in pain. Divorce is ordinary, bureaucratic, even boring in its process; the joke forces it back into the body, making the emotional stakes feel immediate. Context matters, too: in late-20th-century stand-up, divorce became a reliable American punchline, and Williams weaponizes that genre expectation while revealing its gendered bias. The laugh comes with a wince: comedy as a way to admit that for many people, the end of a marriage feels less like separation than extraction.