The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.

Wilson Mizner (1876–1933) was an American wit, playwright, and raconteur associated with Broadway and the Jazz Age’s culture of epigrams and one-liners. The sleep quip circulates as one of his characteristic aphorisms—dry, paradoxical, and aimed at puncturing self-serious “common sense” claims about human nature. It reflects the early-20th-century appetite for compact, quotable humor in newspapers, theatrical circles, and after-dinner speech, where Mizner’s reputation largely traveled through oral repetition and later quotation collections rather than through a single canonical text.

The joke hinges on a comic impossibility: if the “average person” always needs five minutes more sleep, the requirement is perpetually just out of reach. Mizner turns a mundane observation—most people feel under-rested—into a neat paradox that suggests desire and satisfaction rarely align. It also satirizes the authority of “averages” and pseudo-scientific prescriptions: even if you quantify sleep, lived experience is that the target keeps moving. The line’s enduring appeal comes from its universality and its gentle mockery of modern life’s fatigue and perpetual insufficiency.

1) “The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.”
2) “The amount of sleep the average man needs is five minutes more.”
3) “The average person needs five minutes more sleep.”