My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.

Henny Youngman (1906–1998) was a vaudeville- and nightclub-era stand-up known for rapid-fire one-liners and “take my wife”–style misdirection. This joke belongs to his familiar repertoire of short, self-contained gags built on a setup that invites a wholesome inference (“still doesn’t need glasses”) and then flips it with a punchline (“Drinks right out of the bottle”). It circulated widely through live performance, television appearances, and later joke anthologies and recordings, but it is difficult to pin to a single first performance or publication because Youngman’s material was often repeated, refined, and redistributed across venues over decades.

The humor hinges on deliberate ambiguity: “doesn’t need glasses” initially suggests good eyesight in old age, prompting admiration. The punchline reinterprets “glasses” as drinking glasses, revealing the grandmother’s rough-and-ready habit of drinking straight from the bottle. The joke exemplifies Youngman’s signature misdirection—using an everyday phrase with multiple meanings to spring a quick reversal. Beneath the wordplay is a comic portrait of toughness and irreverence in old age, undercutting sentimental expectations about elderly propriety and turning a compliment into a sly, slightly bawdy observation about drinking.