"If you drink don't drive. Don't even putt"

Dean Martin’s wry quip delivers a sober truth behind a tipsy grin. With just two sentences, it turns a public safety message into a compact parable about judgment, control, and self-deception. The wordplay hinges on “drive,” which straddles the worlds of automobiles and golf. By following it with “Don’t even putt,” Martin undercuts any bravado that might dismiss the first warning. If alcohol compromises you so much that a short, delicate tap on a green is unwise, then piloting a ton of steel at highway speed is unthinkable.

The humor works through inversion and escalation. Instead of moving from small to large, the line descends from a serious, high-stakes action to a trivial one, making the caution feel both obvious and irrefutable. It punctures the familiar rationalizations, “I’m fine,” “It’s only a few blocks,” “I can handle it”, by asserting that impairment reaches into even the tiniest motions. Precision, judgment, and restraint are the first casualties of intoxication; if those are unreliable, everything else is too.

There’s also cultural texture. Martin cultivated the image of an affable tippler in an era that celebrated lounge swagger, yet here he smuggles responsibility inside levity. The charm disarms while the message lands: pleasure and prudence must coexist. Comedy becomes a delivery system for ethics, and the brevity makes it sticky enough to remember when it counts.

Read more broadly, the line cautions against overestimating one’s capacities under any clouding influence, booze, ego, adrenaline, even anger. When your faculties are skewed, scale back, postpone, or abstain. Putts stand in for all the “little” decisions that can spiral into big consequences.

Ultimately, the joke survives because it’s true. Alcohol shrinks the space between confidence and catastrophe. By reducing the bar of acceptable risk to the smallest stroke in golf, Martin raises the standard of care we owe to ourselves and others.