Wealth & Money Quote by Jerry Stiller

Jerry Stiller isn’t praising sainthood here so much as staging a domestic miracle in plain clothes. “Anne is very forgiving” lands like a setup line: you can hear the offstage chaos it politely refuses to name. Forgiveness implies offenses, and by leading with it, Stiller frames marriage not as romance but as an ongoing negotiation with human messiness. The comedy is in the understatement; the affection is in the choice to underplay it.

Then he pivots to money, that most reliable marital land mine, and does something sly: he praises Anne’s indifference to status markers (“being rich, or clothes”) while also sketching the cultural script they opted out of. For a comedian who spent his career amplifying petty grievances to absurdity, this is a portrait of a life where the usual material triggers never became usable material. “We never argued about finances” reads like a brag and a punchline at once, because everyone knows how rare - and how loaded - that claim is. It suggests either unusually aligned values or an unglamorous discipline: budgeting, modest expectations, a shared definition of “enough.”

Context matters: Stiller and Anne Meara were a show-business couple, a setting that practically manufactures ego, insecurity, and lifestyle creep. By focusing on what she didn’t care about, he credits her with keeping their partnership outside the industry’s treadmill. The subtext is gratitude with a comedian’s economy: he honors her not with poetry, but with the most intimate compliment he can imagine - she made the hard parts less combustible.