Marriage Quote by Rita Rudner

Rita Rudner turns a tiny cultural detail into a compact roast of heterosexual marriage: a “pierced ear” becomes a résumé line for domestic life. The joke works because it’s structured like advice you might hear from a well-meaning aunt, then swerves into a résumé of suffering and consumerism. “Better prepared” sounds like a self-help metric; what follows is a deadpan inventory of what marriage supposedly requires: tolerance for pain and the willingness to spend money on decorative objects that signal commitment.

The intent is less about earrings than about gender expectations. Traditionally, women are expected to arrive in marriage already trained in both discomfort (beauty routines, bodily policing) and acquisition (jewelry as status, romance, insurance). By putting men in that role, Rudner flips the script and exposes how absurdly normalized those expectations are when aimed at women. The laugh lands in the gap between the language of readiness and the reality of what’s being described: if marriage is a partnership, why does “preparation” sound like endurance training?

Context matters: Rudner’s comedic persona is sharp, controlled, and deceptively “light,” a style that lets critique slip past defenses. The line comes out of an era when men’s ear piercings were a mainstreaming rebellion, a small transgression marketed as edgy. She weaponizes that trend to say: fine, you want the accessory and the attitude? Great. Now you’ve sampled the two pillars of adult commitment: discomfort you chose and money you didn’t want to spend. That’s not romance; it’s the joke’s bleak little truth.