Marriage Quote by Henny Youngman

The joke lands because it flatters devotion while detonating it in the same breath. Youngman opens with a line that could be engraved on an anniversary card - forty-one years, one woman, unwavering love. Then he snaps the frame: the “same woman” isn’t the wife; it’s a secret. The pivot turns romance into risk management, and the audience’s warm assumptions into a sudden, guilty laugh.

Youngman’s intent is classic one-liner misdirection: use the cultural prestige of fidelity as bait, then reveal a scenario where that prestige becomes incriminating evidence. The subtext is less “I’m a cad” than “marriage is a high-stakes contract policed by fear.” The wife, in the punchline, isn’t a person so much as an institution - the one figure you can’t safely confess to, even when the confession sounds virtuous. “She’ll kill me” is cartoon exaggeration, but it encodes a recognizable domestic power dynamic: spouses as each other’s judge and jury.

Context matters: mid-century American stand-up built a whole economy on marriage jokes, with men performing henpecked panic and women positioned as the terrifying auditor of male behavior. Youngman’s genius is compressing that entire gendered script into two sentences, using the language of sentimentality to smuggle in cynicism. The laugh arrives from the whiplash: love as an alibi that instantly becomes a motive.