Marriage Quote by Phyllis Diller

Domestic bliss gets gutted in nine words, and Diller makes the incision look like a party trick. The setup signals dutiful sentiment: a wife, a microphone, a request to honor her husband. Then she swerves hard into the marketplace. "Short and cheap" is what you want in a speech, sure, but it also treats the husband like a commodity, a cut-rate item you can summarize, discount, and move along. The laugh lands because the line pretends to cooperate with the social script while quietly torching it.

Fang, Diller's famously awful offstage-onstage husband, isn't a person so much as a recurring prop: the mythical reason she's frazzled, exhausted, and irresistibly blunt. By naming him here, she invites the audience into an ongoing bit, like a sitcom universe before sitcoms fully owned that rhythm. It's intimacy without confession: she's not telling you anything private, she's reminding you of the shared joke.

The intent isn't cruelty for its own sake; it's control. Mid-century comedy gave women narrow lanes - be charming, be grateful, be decorative. Diller's persona barges out of that lane by treating marriage, the sacred American institution, like a bad purchase and a time-waster. "Asked to say" frames her as compliant; "How about" reveals the mutiny. The subtext is a reversal of power: if a wife is expected to elevate her husband in public, Diller elevates herself instead, with thrift-store ruthlessness and perfect timing.