Marriage Quote by Henny Youngman

Youngman’s line is a pocket-sized vaudeville grenade: it pretends to be a sweet declaration of marital devotion, then detonates into complaint. “I take my wife everywhere” sets up the conventional husband-as-provider script, a performance of loyalty that sounds almost gallant. The punch turns that “everywhere” into a trapdoor. She “keeps finding her way back” flips the frame from romance to unwanted persistence, as if the wife is a boomerang he can’t get rid of. The joke isn’t that she’s clingy; it’s that his attempt to control the narrative of marriage collapses under its own pettiness.

The intent is classic Youngman: lean, instantly legible, built for a room that wants release through cynicism. The subtext is a mid-century masculinity that treats domestic life as both proof of respectability and a recurring sentence. That tension is the engine of a lot of Borscht Belt material: marriage as social credential, spouse as heckler you can’t silence, intimacy reduced to logistics and irritation. It works because it’s structurally efficient: one sentence constructs a virtuous self-image, the next punctures it, leaving the audience complicit in the deflation.

Context matters, too. Coming from a Jewish-American club circuit where self-deprecation and marital gripe were shared currency, the line reads less like a singular attack on a wife than a ritualized complaint about adulthood itself. The laugh is a pressure valve, and also a tiny confession: even “everywhere” doesn’t outrun your real life.