Happiness Quote by George Burns

Burns turns “happiness” into a shopping list, then dares you to admit you want it. The first move is deflation: instead of lofty self-help bromides, he offers a cigar and a meal, the kind of pleasures that feel slightly guilty and therefore more honest. The repetition of “a good cigar” is the joke’s metronome, a rhythm that mimics indulgence itself: you don’t just want the thing, you want it again. Happiness, in this bit, isn’t enlightenment; it’s appetite with good timing.

Then he swerves into sex and gender, and that’s where the line reveals its era and its craft. “A good woman - or a bad woman” plays on a familiar vaudeville binary: the respectable partner versus the thrilling complication. Burns isn’t really weighing moral categories so much as winking at the audience’s private fantasies while keeping it socially survivable. The dash does a lot of work: it’s the pause where the room laughs because it recognizes the thought before the sentence gives it permission.

The closer - “it depends on how much happiness you can handle” - flips the premise into a mock warning. Happiness becomes a vice, something potent enough to require tolerance. That’s Burns’ signature late-career persona: the genial elder statesman of misbehavior, smuggling adult desire past the censors by dressing it up as grandfatherly candor. The subtext is that pleasure is manageable, even negotiable, if you can laugh at your own hungers instead of pretending you don’t have them.