Marriage Quote by Jimmy Durante

Durante’s line is vaudeville misdirection at its cleanest: it opens with the language of sympathy and diagnosis, then snaps into a complaint so petty it exposes the speaker, not the wife, as the real joke. “A slight impediment” cues the audience to brace for something delicate. The punchline yanks that rug: her “impediment” is the basic human need to breathe. The laugh comes from the whiplash between medicalized concern and impatient entitlement.

The intent isn’t really to roast his wife’s speech; it’s to parody a certain husbandly worldview in which a woman’s voice is framed as an interruption. The subtext is older than the Borscht Belt: talkative wife, beleaguered husband. Durante’s genius is how he heightens that stereotype into absurdity. If stopping to breathe is an “impediment,” then the problem isn’t her speech pattern; it’s his refusal to tolerate any pause that doesn’t serve him. The line turns misogynistic grumbling into self-portrait: a man so put upon by domestic chatter that he resents biology.

Context matters. Durante came out of early 20th-century variety circuits where marriage jokes were a staple, safe material that let comics signal relatability without naming politics. In that world, the wife wasn’t a character so much as a pressure valve for male frustration. Still, the construction is sharp enough to read as critique: the husband’s complaint is so unreasonable it invites the audience to laugh at his childishness, not at her. It’s a one-sentence argument for comedy’s oldest trick: reveal the speaker’s smallness by letting him believe he sounds reasonable.