Marriage Quote by Henny Youngman

A perfect two-line murder mystery disguised as domestic bliss, Henny Youngman’s joke runs on the speed of old-school one-liners and the social assumptions that make them land. “Dresses to kill” is a familiar compliment: the wife as a glamorous threat, weaponized elegance, a harmless idiom from the era’s flirtation with femme-fatale imagery. Youngman pivots on that idiom and turns it literal: if she “kills” with clothes, she “kills” with cooking too. The laugh comes from the snap of misdirection, but the engine is darker: marriage as a site of low-grade peril, where love and resentment share a kitchen.

The intent is pure Catskills economy: set up a cliché, twist it, exit. Youngman’s persona thrives on genial complaint, the husband as a beleaguered straight man to his own life. Subtextually, it’s a pressure valve for mid-century anxieties: domestic routines, gender roles, the expectation that a wife should be both attractive and competent at home. The joke “fails” her at the second job and frames that failure as mortal, which is cruel in premise but strategically exaggerated to keep it unserious.

Context matters: this is Borscht Belt humor built for nightclub rooms, where the marriage joke is less autobiography than a shared language. It’s not asking you to believe his wife is a bad cook; it’s asking you to recognize the era’s marriage script, then enjoy the tiny rebellion of saying the unsayable in a single, impeccably timed switchblade of a punchline.