Justice & Law Quote by Bob Hope

Bigamy is an old-school scandal recast as a tidy linguistic trick: “two rites” sounds like a church bulletin, then snaps into “two rights” with a groan-worthy inevitability that’s exactly the point. Bob Hope’s line works because it treats marriage less as sacred bond than as a social system with rules so familiar you can parody them in a single pun. The joke isn’t merely that bigamy is illegal; it’s that the institution is so wrapped in ceremony, paperwork, and moral posture that doubling the ceremony becomes its own punchline.

Hope’s intent is classic mainstream comedy: take a taboo subject (sex, infidelity, duplicity) and launder it through wordplay so it can land in a living room without causing a family fight. “Crime” gives it edge; “rites” gives it respectability; the collision is where the laugh lives. The subtext is mildly cynical but not rebellious: marriage is serious enough to be policed, yet absurd enough to be mocked. In the Hope universe, institutions aren’t toppled; they’re teased.

Context matters. Hope rose in an era when American entertainment navigated tight moral codes and broadcast standards, so jokes often wore tuxedos. His comedy specialized in winking at propriety rather than shattering it. This line is a perfect artifact of that approach: it invites the audience to feel sophisticated for catching the pun while reassuring them that the ultimate verdict remains conventional. The transgression is momentary; the social order, like the wordplay, clicks back into place.