Humor & Life Quote by Jack Benny

The joke works because it treats high society as a matter of scissors, not substance. Jack Benny takes the fancy, French-sounding "Hors D'oeuvre" and drags it back to the deli counter: it is just a ham sandwich, chopped into forty apologetic squares so it can pass as refinement. The punchline is pure Benny-era skepticism about status, delivered with a deadpan thriftiness that made him a national avatar of penny-pinching. If you can make a working-class lunch look expensive simply by slicing it smaller, the whole performance of taste starts to look like a con game.

Benny is also targeting a specific American anxiety: the mid-century pressure to appear sophisticated, to host properly, to have the right foods with the right names. "Hors d'oeuvre" is social camouflage. The humor comes from deflating that camouflage without needing a lecture about class. He lets the math do the work. Forty pieces is absurdly precise, a comic exaggeration that implies both scarcity (there isn't much to go around) and the host's desire to seem generous. Everyone gets something; no one gets enough.

There is a radio-and-early-TV practicality here too: a joke that reads instantly, even if you're half-listening. Benny's intent isn't culinary critique, it's cultural: the elegance we buy is often just smaller portions and bigger vocabulary, served on a nicer plate and sold back to us as belonging.