Christmas carols always brought tears to my eyes. I also cry at weddings. I should have cried at a couple of my own.

In this quip, Ethel Merman plays her public image—brassy, tough, and unsentimental—against a private admission of easy tears. By pairing “Christmas carols” and “weddings,” she names culturally sanctioned occasions for emotion, then undercuts the sentiment with a punchline about her own marriages. The humor depends on self-deprecation and hindsight: she implies that some of her weddings merited tears not from joy but from regret or foreboding. The line also reflects a performer’s timing—setting up sincerity, then snapping into a comic reversal—while hinting at the complexities behind a glamorous show-business life.