My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands and two of them were just napping.

This line is a well-known example of Rita Rudner’s stand-up style: tightly written, deadpan one-liners that pivot on a sudden, darkly comic reversal. Rudner rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of the American stand-up boom and became especially associated with observational jokes delivered in an understated, “proper” persona. The joke is framed as a family anecdote about her grandmother, a familiar setup that invites the audience into something seemingly domestic and harmless before the punchline veers into absurd morbidity. It reflects a broader tradition in stand-up of using exaggerated family stories to create surprise and misdirection.

The humor depends on misdirection and hyperbole. “She buried three husbands” initially suggests resilience in the face of repeated bereavement; the twist—“two of them were just napping”—recasts “tough” as potentially ruthless, turning admiration into mock suspicion. The line plays with the euphemistic language around death (“buried”) and the everyday language of rest (“napping”), collapsing them into a single comic image. It also satirizes the way family legends inflate toughness into near-mythic intimidation. The joke’s dark edge is cushioned by its cartoonish implausibility, signaling that the intent is playful shock rather than literal accusation.