Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Grizzard

Marriage gets reduced to a real-estate transaction with a punchline, and that brutality is exactly the point. Grizzard isn’t really offering a romantic plan; he’s staging a comic autopsy of divorce economics and post-marital bitterness. The joke turns on a sly reversal: instead of enduring the daily friction of a relationship, he’ll skip straight to the perceived “inevitable” payout. It’s weaponized cynicism, delivered in the plainspoken cadence of a guy at the end of the bar who’s funny because he’s not pretending to be fine.

The intent is defensive as much as it is satirical. By framing remarriage as an irrational investment, Grizzard protects himself from vulnerability while inviting the audience to laugh at the one thing he can’t control: the emotional and financial wreckage that can follow love gone bad. The subtext is a caricature of the ex-wife-as-creditor trope, a staple of late-20th-century American humor that treats alimony, property division, and “losing the house” as shorthand for male defeat. It’s not subtle, and it isn’t trying to be; it’s aiming for recognition.

Context matters. Grizzard, a Southern columnist with a populist voice, wrote for readers who prized bluntness and distrusted moralizing. The line plays into that sensibility: relationships as costly, courts as rigged, men as suckers. The laughter lands because it’s half complaint, half confession - a joke that admits heartbreak while insisting it was all just bad math.