Experience is what you have after you’ve forgotten her name.

Cast as a one-liner, the remark treats “experience” as the residue left after the vivid particulars of a romantic or sexual encounter have faded—reduced, in memory, to a generalized lesson. The punchline hinges on the contrast between what feels important in the moment (the person, “her name”) and what remains later (a hardened, sometimes cynical wisdom). In keeping with Berle’s nightclub-era comic persona, it also plays on a slightly risqué, world-weary view of relationships: intimacy becomes anecdote, and the moral is learned only after the emotional details are gone. The joke thus satirizes how people convert personal history into “experience” by forgetting the human specificity involved.