Humor & Life Quote by Henny Youngman

A one-liner like this is built to detonate fast: it lures you in with a familiar setup about money, then yanks the rug with a punchline that turns “cost” into “value.” Youngman’s intent isn’t to litigate divorce law or even Jewishness; it’s to weaponize the audience’s expectation that a “Jewish” joke will land on thrift, bargaining, and communal stereotypes. The bait is the old caricature of Jews as tight with cash. The switch is that the speaker gladly pays anyway, implying the marriage was so miserable that any price is a bargain.

That’s the subtext: not “divorces are expensive,” but “peace is priceless,” delivered in the language of complaints and receipts. The line also smuggles in a second reversal. A divorce, culturally, is supposed to be a loss, a failure, a rupture. Youngman reframes it as a luxury purchase you don’t regret, a premium service that finally works.

Context matters. Youngman came up in the Borscht Belt and midcentury American nightclub circuit, where Jewish comics often told jokes about Jews to mainstream audiences as a kind of social passport: self-deprecation as assimilation strategy. The joke rides that edge. It risks reinforcing stereotypes while also signaling control over them: the comic gets to name the stereotype, twist it, and cash the laugh. The sting is that it’s not really about Jews at all; it’s about the universal fantasy of buying your way out of a bad situation, and feeling almost giddy when the bill arrives.