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If You See This Man...Don't Call
To be fair, the brand of humor Rodney Dangerfield made famous isn’t completely one-sided. Someone recently sent me this joke as proof that men sometimes get the “take-my-wife” treatment, too:
A WOMAN'S PERFECT BREAKFAST
She's sitting at the table with her gourmet coffee.
Her son is on the cover of the Wheaties box.
Her daughter is on the cover of Business Week.
Her boyfriend is on the cover of Playgirl.
And her husband is on the back of the milk carton.
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"Seventy percent of people asked to choose between their spouse and their dog will choose the dog.”
—animal behaviorist Dr. Nicholas H. Dodman, If Only They Could Speak
Surely you know the old Rodney Dangerfield line, “Take my wife…please!” It’s a great joke, one of the classics, the granddaddy of a whole huge genre of jokes about how deeply men care for their wives—not!
I know of no man who doesn’t relish subjecting his wife to sharp little barbs like Dangerfield’s to put her in her place. It’s as though they want us to feel we’re in some sort of permanent probationary period during which we could lose our jobs for the slightest infraction.
I have a friend Doug who likes to remind his wife Julie just how tenuous her position is by introducing her to everyone they meet as his “first wife.” She’s his only wife, and they’ve been married for something like 20 years, but he wants her to know that he hasn’t yet decided whether to keep her or not.
Not even a certain measure of fame guarantees that a woman’s husband will regard her with anything but a yawn. I just finished reading Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, by former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl. It documents her six or so years of donning outrageous costumes, wigs and makeup all in order to dine incognita so as to see how the rest of us poor slobs—those without a byline in a major newspaper—get treated at New York eateries.
In one guise she became a platinum blonde and suddently discovered a heretofore latent ability to twist men around her little finger. She proved so adept at it that on her first outing as a flaxen-haired vixen she snagged a date with a businessman who offered to take her to one of the city’s priciest dining spots. This presented an interesting conundrum, because Reichl was (and still is) married and the mother of a young son. “This,” I thought as I read about her rendezvous, “is where it gets interesting.” I wondered if her husband would put up a fuss about his wife flirting with another man, even if it was in the line of duty.
Unless a lot more happened than Reichl chose to share with readers, the answer is “no.” All her husband did was ask her to be home by midnight…and that was probably just so she wouldn’t wake him up climbing into bed in the wee hours.
My husband K— is a master of the Dangerfield-style gibe. He loves to treat me to stories like this: One day when a work colleague from Bermuda came to his office on a business trip, he said, “Hey Mick, my wife wants to go to Bermuda. I want her to go, too. Can she stay at your place?”
Then there was the time a difficult neighbor made some menacing remarks about our pets. K— told her, “You can threaten me, and you can threaten my wife…but don’t you dare threaten my cats!” I didn’t know whether to agree or disagree, and I’m still scratching my head over that one.
Which brings me to the old sinking ship scenario. If I and one of our cats were on a ship and somehow went overboard, which one of us would my loving husband save—me or the cat? Actually, the answer to that is easy: the cat, because with odds of 7 to 3 against me, I wouldn’t set foot on that boat without a life jacket on.
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