Daily Inspiration Quote by Burt Reynolds

Reynolds lands the joke with a piece of macho arithmetic: take the romantic institution, subtract the romance, and what you have left is an absurdly overpriced domestic service. The line works because it’s not really about laundry; it’s about the old bargain men were taught to believe in. Marriage, in this framing, is less partnership than transaction, and the punchline is that the “average man” is too emotionally inarticulate (or too entitled) to admit he wants care, routine, and a softer landing. So he disguises dependency as comedy.

The intent is a double flex. Reynolds gets to sound like the charming rogue who can’t be domesticated, while also nodding at the audience’s suspicion that marriage is a financial trap. “Most expensive” turns a private fear into a public laugh: alimony, mortgages, weddings, the whole price tag of settling down. It’s stand-up economics with a wink, a way to complain without sounding bitter.

The subtext is more complicated, and a bit grim: it assumes women’s labor is background noise, something you only notice when you quantify it. Calling a spouse “laundry” collapses a person into a function, and that reductive move is exactly what makes the line feel like its era. Reynolds’ star persona in the 1970s and 80s traded on swagger, vulnerability kept off-camera, and gender roles played broad for laughs. The quip isn’t just anti-marriage; it’s pro-image, protecting the myth of the self-sufficient man by admitting, in the most sideways way possible, that he isn’t.