Some of the funniest one-liners are the ones that don’t need much room at all, and all it takes is a good setup or a sharp turn to get everyone laughing.
A psychiatrist with bad news
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield had a way of making being disliked sound like something almost competitive. He once said, ‘I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous. Everyone hasn’t met me yet.’ What a turn.
The joke somehow gets worse the longer you think about it, really. Dangerfield actually built his act around getting ‘no respect’ from people for years, so this sort of self-deprecating humor truly worked for him.
One missing dog
Steven Wright only needed a few words to come across as absolutely hilarious. He made the joke, ‘I spilled spot remover on my dog. Now he’s gone.’ It’s one of those jokes that doesn’t need an extra line or explanation because the humor’s in those few words.
Wright became known across the country in the early 1980s, and it’s mostly because of the voice he delivered his jokes in. He’d say them in a flat, almost half-asleep voice. It only made his lines even stranger, and funnier.
The courtroom option
Marriage jokes might’ve existed forever, and Groucho Marx managed to tell one of the best ones around. He said, ‘I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.’ The line really fits Marx’s style, where he’d make a perfectly normal sentence go sideways halfway through.
It even made it onto PBS American Masters’ list of Marx’s most famous jokes. It’s unclear when or where he first said it, though.
A very long walk
Funny woman Ellen DeGeneres has a lot of good one-liners, and here’s one of her best. She said, ‘My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where she is.’
DeGeneres knew it was a funny line, and that’s why she kept using it decades into her career. It was even part of her 2024 Netflix special For Your Approval. It’s a pretty effective joke, really, so you can’t blame her.
Therapy takes a turn
No topic was off-limits for Stewart Francis, and that included therapy. He said, ‘My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance. We’ll see about that.’ It’s those last four words that flip the joke on its head.
Francis became well-known for his relentless one-liners, and he performed this joke as early as 2007. The Canadian comic has jokes that are famous across the world. He’s just that good.
Meeting the other Joan
Joan Rivers wasn’t the kind of person to need anyone else to make fun of her. No, she was perfectly capable of poking fun at herself first, and she once commented, ‘I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.’
A lot of people might be embarrassed about their cosmetic procedures. But not Rivers. She talked openly about them for years and turned the subject into part of her act, rather than dodging it. That’s part of what makes her joke so funny, the fact that she can poke fun at herself.
Medical advice gets literal
Turns out, Henny Youngman’s doctor had no interest in medicine at all. That’s how he made it seem, anyway. He said, ‘I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.’
It should come as no surprise that Youngman became known as the ‘King of the One-Liners’ because his jokes were that good. He was born in 1907 and spent decades sharing lines like this. You barely got a break between jokes.
A very patient husband
Time for another marriage joke. It’s back to Dangerfield again, who once said, ‘I haven’t spoken to my wife in years. I didn’t want to interrupt her.’ He’d often use marriage during his comedy acts, although he went for a different style than most comics.
He usually made himself the loser in whatever situation he was describing, rather than the superior person. It’s hard to pin down his first performance of this joke, and maybe that’s fitting. He’d probably say nobody was listening to him, anyway.
Immortality is going nicely
Some people think this joke comes from Steven Wright, but he actually admitted that he never came up with it. Still, it’s pretty funny. The one-liner ‘he’ said was, ‘I intend to live forever. So far, so good.’
The logic is sound. Kind of, anyway. Wright built a lot of his comedy around making statements that made you think for a little longer, as they tended to sound reasonable at the very start. It makes sense that people would think he said this one.
Lincoln answers an insult
Even President Abraham Lincoln could be funny, and didn’t need a modern comedy club to do it. He came up with a brutal comeback after being accused of being two-faced. He replied, ‘If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?’
Lincoln was often mocked for his appearance during his political career, but he refused to take those jabs lying down, and he sometimes responded to those attacks by making jokes himself. That way, he could mock himself before anyone else could.
The blouse experiment
Phyllis Diller was as funny off screen as she was on screen. Yes, she once summed up an entire fashion disaster in one sentence, in which she said, ‘I once wore a peekaboo blouse. People would peek and then they’d boo.’
It might be corny, sure, but it’s also very funny in exactly the way Diller was famous for. Her stage character was as loud as it was strange. Diller had been performing professionally since the 1950s, meaning that she had plenty of time to perfect this sort of thing.
A question answers itself
Emo Philips knew how to tell a joke and make it sound simple at first. It’s only when you hear it again that you see the humor in it. He said, ‘People come up to me and say, ‘Emo, do people really come up to you?’’
Philips used the line on his 1985 comedy album E=mo². It was one of the recordings that helped him establish his kind of wacky, high-pitched stage persona.
Self-improvement has conditions
Anthony Jeselnik sometimes made it seem like he was getting sincere. He started one joke, ‘My girlfriend makes me want to be a better person.’ It sounds reasonable enough. But then came the punchline, ‘So I can get a better girlfriend.’
The line came from Jeselnik’s 2010 debut comedy album Shakespeare, and it actually opens a track called ‘Romance.’ The A.V. Club picked it out as one of the best lines from the record when they reviewed the album. It’s not hard to see why.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
17 of the best one-liner jokes ever told
The best thing about a one-liner is that it has nowhere to hide, and that’s why the really good ones still get a laugh decades after somebody first said them.
