Wealth & Money Quote by Fred Allen

Allen’s joke works because it treats the most bureaucratic object in American life as something intimate and humiliating: your clothes. An income tax form, in theory, is neutral paperwork - a civic receipt. A laundry list is even more domestic, a mild little record of socks and collars. Allen yokes them together to reveal the same hidden punchline: both are inventories of what you own, and both end with you feeling poorer than when you started.

“Lose your shirt” is doing triple duty. It’s an old idiom for financial ruin, it’s literally what happens when you hand your clothing over to be cleaned, and it hints at exposure - being made bare. Taxes and laundering are systems that promise order and cleanliness, but they require submission: you turn over your earnings to the state; you turn over your garments to a service; you wait to see what comes back, and what it costs. The laugh arrives in that suspicious gap between what’s taken and what’s returned.

Context matters. Allen is a mid-century radio-era comedian, the kind of performer who turned everyday irritations into a shared national language. This is Depression-and-war-shadowed America sliding into a modern tax state, when withholding and expanded federal revenue made taxation feel less like an annual ritual and more like a permanent bite. Allen doesn’t rant; he shrugs with a razor blade. The joke flatters the audience’s cynicism: you’re not crazy for thinking the “forms” always win.