Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance?

Phyllis Diller (1917–2012) built her early-1960s stand-up persona around a deliberately exaggerated “anti–perfect housewife” character: frazzled, domesticity-averse, and perpetually at war with chores, cooking, and conventional expectations of women. The line “Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance?” belongs to that comic repertoire, reflecting mid‑20th‑century American cultural pressures that linked female respectability to immaculate housekeeping. Diller’s act flipped those norms into punchlines, using one-liners about cleaning and marriage to satirize the ideal of cheerful domestic labor and to give audiences—especially women—permission to laugh at the burden and absurdity of those standards.

The joke hinges on mock risk assessment: housework is obviously not lethal, yet the speaker treats it as if it were dangerous enough to avoid. By inflating the “threat” of chores, Diller exposes how draining, thankless, and socially enforced domestic work can feel. The line also functions as a small rebellion—refusing the moral seriousness attached to housekeeping and puncturing the notion that a woman’s worth is measured by spotless floors. Its enduring appeal comes from how it converts everyday fatigue and resentment into a crisp, deflationary quip: if the task is optional, why volunteer for it?