"I like women, but you can't always trust them. Some of them are big liars, like this one woman I met who had a dog. I asked her her dog's name and then I asked, 'Does he bite?' and she said, 'No.' And I said, 'So how does he eat?' Liar!"
About this Quote
Demetri Martin starts with a deliberately ugly premise - the timeworn, bar-stool generalization about women and “trust” - then yanks the floor out from under anyone ready to groan or nod along. The misdirection is the whole play: he borrows the cadence of misogynistic suspicion to bait an expectation of bitterness, then reveals the “evidence” is a cartoonishly stupid misunderstanding about a dog biting versus a dog eating. The punchline isn’t “women lie.” The punchline is how eagerly people build grand theories from tiny social frictions, and how language itself lets us feel righteous while being wrong.
What makes it work is the escalation of confidence alongside the collapse of logic. Martin performs certainty (“Some of them are big liars”) and then supplies a case study that proves only his own interpretive failure. “Does he bite?” is a vague question, and the woman’s “No” is perfectly reasonable in everyday conversation: she’s answering “Will he bite me?” not “Is biting biologically possible?” Martin’s mock-outrage (“Liar!”) is the childlike insistence that words must be literal, a stance that exposes the speaker as pedantic and socially incompetent, not victimized.
Contextually, it’s a classic Martin move: a clean, observational one-liner that uses logic as a prop, not a proof. The subtext is a critique of how prejudice operates - it dresses itself up as anecdote and certainty. By choosing “women” as the bait, he also risks the listener’s complicity: if you laughed too quickly at the setup, the joke quietly laughs back at you.
What makes it work is the escalation of confidence alongside the collapse of logic. Martin performs certainty (“Some of them are big liars”) and then supplies a case study that proves only his own interpretive failure. “Does he bite?” is a vague question, and the woman’s “No” is perfectly reasonable in everyday conversation: she’s answering “Will he bite me?” not “Is biting biologically possible?” Martin’s mock-outrage (“Liar!”) is the childlike insistence that words must be literal, a stance that exposes the speaker as pedantic and socially incompetent, not victimized.
Contextually, it’s a classic Martin move: a clean, observational one-liner that uses logic as a prop, not a proof. The subtext is a critique of how prejudice operates - it dresses itself up as anecdote and certainty. By choosing “women” as the bait, he also risks the listener’s complicity: if you laughed too quickly at the setup, the joke quietly laughs back at you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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