Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

George Burns (1896–1996), the long-lived American vaudevillian, film actor, and television comedian, became especially identified in his later decades with dry, aphoristic one-liners about marriage, aging, and domestic life. This quip about “happiness” and family belongs to that tradition of mid‑20th‑century American stand-up and show-business humor: it plays on the sentimental ideal of the close-knit family only to undercut it with a punchline that values distance and personal peace. The line is widely circulated in quotation collections and on posters, typically presented as a Burns one-liner rather than tied to a single, well-documented performance date or publication.

The joke hinges on a reversal of expectations. “Happiness” is conventionally linked to intimacy, proximity, and familial warmth; Burns keeps the language of affection (“loving, caring, close-knit”) but relocates the family “in another city,” implying that the pleasures of family are best enjoyed at a remove. The humor depends on the tension between obligation and autonomy: family can be a source of support, but also of intrusion, conflict, and constant demands. By framing distance as the condition of happiness, the line satirizes idealized family rhetoric and celebrates the comic wisdom of boundaries—loving people without needing them in one’s immediate space.

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