Humor & Life Quote by Henny Youngman

A one-liner like this works because it turns a supposedly romantic ritual into forensic evidence. Youngman grabs the visual shorthand of weddings - rice tossed at the bride and groom - and repurposes it as wear-and-tear. Not "she's unlucky", not "she's hopeful", but "she's been pelted so often it leaves marks". The punchline lands on the rude efficiency of arithmetic: marriage count becomes bodily residue.

The intent is pure nightclub-era sting: a quick, legible jab that rewards the audience for knowing the trope and for sharing a cynical baseline about matrimony. Youngman, whose persona was built on breezy cruelty ("Take my wife... please"), treats marriage less like a sacred institution than a repeating consumer transaction. The woman in the joke isn't a character; she's a target. That's the subtext: female desirability framed as both spectacle and liability, with "many marriages" coded as moral failure or comic pathology.

Context matters. Mid-century stand-up thrived on fast misogyny because it played well in mixed crowds and reassured men that the domestic sphere was ridiculous, not destabilizing. The image of rice also locates the joke in a particular America, where big public weddings were common enough to be instantly readable.

It's also a small masterclass in compression: one prop (rice) implies ceremony, repetition, and public judgment. The laugh comes from the collision of romance and abrasion, a wedding tradition recast as a scar.