Wealth & Money Quote by Phyllis Diller

Poverty jokes usually ask for pity or virtue; Phyllis Diller weaponizes them for volume. "There's so little money in my bank account, my scenic checks show a ghetto" is an absurdist collision of middle-class respectability and urban stigma, delivered with her trademark self-mockery: even the decorative wallpaper on her checks has been dragged down by her balance. The gag works because it treats financial humiliation as contagious. Not only are you broke; your identity paperwork is broke. Your self-presentation, that thin veneer of order, can’t keep up.

The word choice does a lot of cultural lifting. "Scenic checks" signals a specific era when banks sold personalized checkbooks with quaint landscapes, the kind of consumer product meant to project taste and stability. Diller punctures that aspirational performance in a single clause. The punchline "show a ghetto" leans on a loaded, now glaringly dated shorthand: the "ghetto" as a visual synonym for decay. It’s a laugh built out of class anxiety and coded geography, tapping into mid-century America’s obsession with neighborhoods as moral indicators.

Diller’s intent isn’t social realism; it’s social release. She takes the domestic, feminized space of budgeting and turns it into spectacle, making economic insecurity something you can laugh at loudly, not whisper about. The subtext is that respectability is a costume you buy on credit, and when the money runs out, the costume rips in public.