Life & Mortality Quote by Henny Youngman

The joke lands like a rimshot and then lingers like a grim little shrug: marriage as a fate so exhausting that death starts to look like an exit strategy. Youngman builds it on a classic setup-and-swerve. The first line pretends to offer a sociological puzzle - a demographic “why” - then undercuts it with a punchline that’s brutally simple and willfully reductive. “They want to” turns longevity into preference, transforming a serious topic (mortality, gendered health gaps) into domestic farce.

Youngman’s intent is less to “insult” Jewish marriage than to weaponize a familiar persona: the harried husband, eternally outmatched by his wife’s endurance and authority. In mid-century American Borscht Belt comedy, Jewishness often functioned as a shorthand for a certain home life: loud, nagging, affectionate, transactional, built on complaint as a love language. The joke relies on that stereotype without spelling it out; the audience fills in the picture of the wife who outlasts him because she’s tougher, sharper, and, crucially, not trying to escape.

The subtext is darker than the laugh suggests. It normalizes male misery as comedy and frames marriage as a zero-sum battle where one side “wins” by surviving. It also smuggles in a cultural defense mechanism: making mortality funny to domesticate fear. Youngman’s brilliance is in the economy - seven words that turn a potentially bleak truth into a performance of control. You laugh because the alternative is admitting the question isn’t actually a joke at all.