Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.

The quip treats alimony as a futile expenditure: “buying oats for a dead horse” evokes spending money on something that cannot benefit from it. In this framing, payments to an ex-spouse are cast not as support or equitable redistribution after a marriage ends, but as waste—money poured into a relationship that is already “dead.” The humor depends on a blunt, transactional view of marriage and divorce, and it reflects a strain of early-to-mid 20th-century Anglo-American joke culture that often portrayed divorce settlements as punitive or absurd. As a one-liner, it is less an argument about family law than a cynical, gendered comic complaint about post-marital obligations.