Marriage Quote by Jack Benny

Domestic bliss, in Jack Benny's hands, isn't candlelight and compromise; it's a deadpan crime scene with excellent timing. The line works because it pretends to offer a wholesome, long-marriage credential ("forty-seven years") and then yanks the rug out with a punch line that escalates straight past divorce into murder. It's hyperbole with a tuxedo on: polite, measured, and quietly unhinged.

Benny's specific intent is to puncture the sentimental mythology of marriage without actually attacking his wife or the institution. Divorce is framed as the ultimate marital failure in mid-century American respectability culture; by saying "never", he signals loyalty and endurance. Then he sneaks in the honest part - long relationships generate rage - but renders it socially acceptable by exaggerating it into absurdity. The joke isn't "I hate my wife". The joke is that the only emotions you're allowed to admit in public are the ones dressed up as comedy.

The subtext is also about performance. Benny's persona was famously stingy, vain, and exquisitely controlled; "murder, yes" lands because it's delivered like a reasonable option, as if he's calmly ranking solutions. That dryness makes the violence purely rhetorical, a pressure-release valve for the audience's own domestic frustrations.

Context matters: a comedian from radio and early TV, working in an era when marital conflict was both common and publicly sanitized. Benny offers a wink: everyone knows marriage can be maddening; the trick is to survive it with your reputation - and your punch lines - intact.